The Happening

Directed by M Night Shyamalan, starring Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel, John Leguizamo, Ashlyn Sanchez

The Happening is all too clearly supposed to be a thought-provoker, a conversation-inducer, a film that comes with its own water cooler for you all to gather round and chat excitedly.

The action begins in New York, on a summer's day in Central Park. In among the panoply of ordinariness, people start behaving strangely. Then fatally. The strange behavior begins with the whole city crowd standing stock still, and then very, very slowly starting to walk backwards. It looks like an iPod advert.

At the same moment, in Philadelphia - where the plague is heading, fast - Mark Wahlberg is playing Elliott, a serious high school science teacher, wearing a sleeveless jumper. He is quizzing his intrigued class of teens about recent reports of honeybees disappearing from North America overnight - an ill omen.

Elliott's wife Alma is played by Zooey Deschanel, who gives the most baffling performance of her life. Almost her very first shot is a big close-up showing her face apparently in clinical shock. She staggers around in a daze of bad acting, and the only thing Deschanel looks genuinely frightened by is the silliness of the script.

But even she is not as weird as John Leguizamo, playing another mathematics teacher at Wahlberg's school. Leguizamo looks like a querulous spaniel heading for its final trip to the vet's.

Perhaps Shyamalan wanted to be a 21st-century George A Romero. Instead I'm afraid he is turning into Ed Wood Jr.