Review: The Mist (4/5)

Frank Darabont’s old-fashioned, crowd-pleasing horror has
the potential to be cheesy. But it never is. And the ending will have you reeling



The Mist
(Frank Darabont):
Thomas Jane, Andre Braugher, Laurie Holden, Toby Jones, Marcia Gay Harden.
Running time: 125 minutes.

The end of days, some would have you believe, is nearly upon us. The air is thickening with doom. We’ve got recession, global warming, dwindling oil, plus everybody seems to be reading Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – and after that grim parable, even the lingering summer evenings have lost their heat and charm. The best sort of escape from this would be to bunker down in the cinema. Only now, you’ll find The Mist at the cineplex, and that too is full of apocalyptic scare-mongering. There’s just no escape.
The film is directed by Frank Dumont of The Shawshank Redemption, from a Stephen King novella, and it comes with the crowd-pleasing frights of an old-fashioned
B-movie horror, tricked up into a swift, full-scale assault on humanity. There is nothing essentially original about it: it’s full of grisly terrors we have seen and imagined before. But the real horror in the film, the kind that left me winded and sick in the gut, was a neat philosophical demonstration of how human beings, by their very nature, have only got themselves to blame.
The horror genre was always ideal for tapping the zeitgeist of our deepest terrors. James Whale, when he started making horror pictures for Universal in the 1930s, saw science as the bogeyman and cautioned us with Frankenstein’s monster and the Invisible Man. By the 1950s, nuclear annihilation, communism and scientific meddling were the collective anxiety, captured by filmmakers in a sweep of B-movie classics.
Today, that kind of horror has taken a backseat to men who use power tools on female backpackers. But the cautionary horror still lingers: Joon-ho Bong’s monster movie The Host in 2006 wagged a scaly finger about pollution and Night M Shyamalan’s recent The Happening, though misjudged, was a cautionary eco-horror. In The Mist, one of the most chilling moments comes when the camera pulls back to reveal the vista of a jeep full of escaping passengers dwarfed by something monstrous. The demonstration is clear: something this size is too big to put to rights.
None of this is immediately apparent to David Drayton (Thomas Jane), an artist who wakes to discover his family home has been clipped by a tree during a storm. Out on the lake, a thick cotton-wool cloud is rolling towards town. He goes for supplies with his son only to find the town’s inhabitants gathered there. The fog hits the windows like a blanket and a man falls through the door covered in blood: “There’s something in the mist!” he says. And he’s right: for a start there’s John Carpenter’s The Fog and later, an infestation of half-seen nasties from the back-catalogue of horror movies. There are plenty of scares, but it is what is inside the supermarket that proves more disturbing: humans. And Frank Darabont goes to work on the thin veneer of civility.
Thomas Jane’s David looks like Tom Hanks’ younger brother, all easy charm and smirking eyes, with a thick brow worthy of Charlton Heston. He’s just the kind of guy you need in a sticky situation. Besides him is Toby Young, a tiny supermarket manager who proves big on courage and deadly with shot; there’s blonde teacher Amanda (Laurie Holden), who is there only because David’s wife is left at home, and the film needs eye candy.
In one scene, they encounter a terrible problem: how do you, in the thick of fog, hope to find your car in a car park? (I know a chap who can’t find his in daylight; how would he fare in fog surrounded by monsters?) More terrifying is Mrs Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden, stealing the show), who mutates into an old-testament bible-basher. She whips up a dangerous fervour in the supermarket, reminding you of those scary Shawshank Redemption fans, the earnest ones who are convinced Darabont’s earliest film is the greatest movie ever made.
And what about cynical neighbour Brent (Andre Braugher), who scoffs when David tells them they’ve just beaten back a tentacle from a door. “A tentacle from Planet X?” he laughs. Even the characters in the film know how potentially cheesy this is. And yet The Mist never is.
Like Cloverfield, The Mist thrives off old-school shocks, but it finds a way to avoid our cynicism by keeping the fog wrapped thick and letting our imagination do most of the work. Darabont roams easily between visceral horror and psychological terror. His idea of horror is protean and it tightens its grip on you like a tentacle: it mutates into different things, starting with monsters, turning to humans and even becomes metaphysical, scorning our ability to make decisions with any sort of clarity.
The end is a thumper: Darabont’s picture shows life like a mist, impossible to see beyond where you stand, and how to meddle in anything, including your own fate, only brings about unforeseen circumstances. It’s a lesson for us all.