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Friday 5 December 2008

Here be monsters

The Mist
15, Nationwide

As any fan of Howard Hawks, George A. Romero or John Carpenter will know, it’s not the monsters outside your window that you should worry about. It’s the people who are trapped indoors with you. Your friends, family, acquaintances and colleagues. The Humans. They’re the most horrific things of all.

This dreary set-up has inspired a handful of great films — from The Thing from Another World (1951) through to Night of the Living Dead (1968) and The Thing (1982). A rich lineage, indeed. And although it doesn’t add anything particularly new, Frank Darabont’s The Mist may well deserve a place alongside them.

The Mist sticks pretty closely to its Stephen King source — a 1981 novella of the same name — making it considerably brisker and more fantastic than Darabont’s previous King features, The Shawshank Redemption (1994) and The Green Mile (1999).

The narrative is endearingly straightforward. A father and his young son (Thomas Jane and Nathan Gamble) head into the small town of Castle Rock, Maine, to pick up supplies after a storm. While they’re in the local supermarket, the eponymous mist descends. It holds all manner of Lovecraftian nasties, forcing our heroes to hole-up in the building. Problem is, they’re stuck in there with Mrs Carmody (Marcia Gay Holden), a religious nut who soon whips up panic and holy terror. Cue attacks from within and without.

Much of The Mist is happily reminiscent of a 1950s sci-fi movie. For starters, it has an innocent fascination in the extraordinary — from the monsters in the mist to the ‘inter-dimensional rift’ that may have brought them to Castle Rock. Computer-generated images they may be, but the creatures are as imaginatively — and, dare I say, as lovingly — rendered as many of Ray Harryhausen’s Dynamation efforts. For a film of this sort, such details can’t be understated.

Besides, just like the sci-fi films of the Fifties, this is one for future social historians. A people threatened by an unseen foe and evangelical scaremongering? The intended, post-9/11 parallels don’t really need spelling out, although Darabont has done so in several interviews.

It’s difficult to charge Darabont with being too heavy-handed with the political allegory. After all, his is a close adaptation of a work written over 25 years ago. But there are still occasions when it all breaks too forcefully through the celluloid, and becomes a distraction rather than a subtext. Most of this is down to some clunky lines in the screenplay, such as when the store clerk, Ollie (Toby Jones), muses, ‘As a species we’re fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room and we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?’

But, thankfully, Jones’s marvellous performance prevents even this line from seeming too out of place. Indeed, I suspect that good acting, all round, saves The Mist from the worst extremes of King’s clumsy characterisation and Darabont’s politicising. The Bible-waving Mrs Carmody, in particular, should come across as a caricature, but is rescued from that fate by the ever-reliable Holden.

A word on the film’s style, for that’s where much of its power springs from. Rather than the poised classicism of his previous King adaptations, Darabont’s gone down the route of the hand-held camera, the long take and the in-amongst-them perspective. OK, so it may not be revolutionary. And it may have been taken to fresh extremes by the recent cycle of camcorder films, such as Cloverfield (2008). But in Darabont’s hands the techniques are unfussy and convincing. They really do make the horror feel raw and immediate. It’s so effective that when each scene ends with a pointed fade-to-black it feels like the film exhaling — to relieve the tension.

The ending is destined to be a talking point. King’s novella finishes with a slow drift into nothingness. But — and I’m trying not to ruin anything here — Darabont replaces that with an abrupt crash into nothingness-of-a-different-sort. It’s straight from the Twilight Zone school of irony. And I’m still not sure whether it enriches or cheapens what has gone before.

That uncertainty — and a few moments of heavy-handedness — aside, The Mist is easy to recommend. It’s an ideal Halloween flick, so it’s a shame that it’s hitting UK screens in July. I quite wanted to step out of the cinema into coldness and darkness. And then go looking for monsters.

More articles from: Peter Hoskin | this section

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