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Stephen King's The Mist
Reviewed by Theo Michelfeld
Posted: November 28, 2007

Evil clowns and haunted cars and rabid Saint Bernards notwithstanding, a frightened human being is the most dangerous creature of all—or so Stephen King has long professed with his fiction. Indeed one of his trademarks has been to illustrate how people respond differently to a crisis, and to include at least one character who, when all hell breaks loose upon the earth, freaks out and abandons all civility, reason, and morality. To my knowledge, though, King has never suggested that his obligatory nutcase character is right. And here Frank Darabont’s new film adaptation of King’s novella The Mist diverges not only from the specific source material, but from the crucial tether to sanity that has consistently tempered King’s 33-year rampage of literary creepiness.  

The Mist is about a group of ordinary people trapped in a grocery store when a supernatural fog bank rolls out of another dimension and spawns giant mutated squids, spiders, mosquitoes, and pterodactyls that inflict grisly, agonizing dispatchings on anyone who ventures outside. Did I mention this is a horror movie? Folks, I suggest you consider the plot of this movie before choosing to see it. Despite any buzz you may have heard about its philosophical and biblical overtones, The Mist is every bit as horrific as it would be on the simplest level. It’s not just gory. It’s downright upsetting. So consider yourselves warned.

The film stars the terrific, underrated, practically-unknown actor Thomas Jane, who once upon a time delivered a hilarious supporting performance in Boogie Nights. Jane now seems to have settled into a comfort zone as an over-qualified B-movie actor, but in this film he is having nowhere near the freewheeling fun he had in the must-see, wonderfully bad shark movie Deep Blue Sea. His performance is the best thing about The Mist, but even so he is thoroughly hemmed in by the material, and denied any chance at elevating this film into something actually enjoyable.

Marcia Gay Harden also stars, as the religious zealot who insists that the mist-shrouded creatures are agents of God’s wrath, and that all the film’s victims deserve what they’re getting. She gradually converts most of her fellow shoppers into verbally abusive, knife-wielding maniacs bent on human sacrifice. Thus the non-believers soon find themselves between a rock and a hard place.

This film includes abundant moral philosophizing, which would be a lot more compelling if all its supposed sinners weren’t actually saints. What this movie needed, to really juice up the ponderings, was some adultery, thievery, or, at the very least, coveting—something for its doomsday preacher to latch onto as visual evidence of unholy human behavior. As it is, she stands there admonishing her congregation for abortion and stem cell research, even though no one present is engaging in any such activity. It makes for the blandest possible conflict.

In any case, the impact of this film is all about its ghoulish, shocking, shamefully misguided ending. No doubt Darabont thinks he is posing the question “What if there is a God?” along with the follow-up question: “…and what if he’s an ironist?” But in fact Darabont is posing this question: “What if there is a perversely vengeful God who has in store for you a fate worse than death if you don’t heed the ravings of the craziest, orneriest, bible-thumpingest lady in the grocery store?” Granted, there are people out there, in abundance, whose lives are guided by this darkest, saddest of hedged bets. And those people, in their special way, are even scarier than all the mutant pterodactyls from all the other dimensions combined. But they’re not scary because they’re right, or even because they might be right. They’re scary because they think they’re right. So snap out of it, Frank Darabont. You’ve crossed over into crackpot territory. And over here, where we’re keeping our marbles, we need all hands on deck.

Copyright © 2007 Theo Michelfeld