ZionSiva’s Groove

Stephen King writes about people. He is known for his monsters, but what sets him apart from most genre writers is the way he pens believable human beings. Frank Darabont is the one director that understands King better than anyone: his adaptations are all about King’s characters, he chose some of the most interesting stories in the writer’s canon and made them into his own vision. In The Mist, his storytelling abilities reach a new high, turning a bleak and desparing horror scenario in an ode to hope.

The movie starts by following David, a good man and an artist, whose house has been struck by a fallen tree during a storm. His paintings have been destroyed in the process, but his family is OK. Everything seems calm, apart from a thick mist enveloping everything around him. He goes to town with his son to buy groceries. In the convenience store, a man says something is hiding in the mist. Soon after the people in the store realize something horrible is happening: insect-like monsters, ranging in size from small to gigantic, are taking over the town, hidden in the thick mist. David and his son are stuck in the mall, and everyone is scared to death and unsure of what to do. What they do know is that they don’t want to leave. A woman decides to go out to get her children, regardless of the risks in going out. No one goes with her. She decides to go even if the others seems to hate her for it. She disappears in the mist.  

The conflicting personalities inside the store drive the story. The military know something happened in the night, and we eventually find out that an explosion during a military experiment opened a portal to another dimension: two of them hang themselves, another one is used by the people as a sacrifice to the monsters. Mrs. Carmody, a devout, obesessive Catholic woman, tries to convince the others that they should surrender to the will of God and the creatures; A skeptic lawyer, a frustrated clerk, a caring a strong teacher. Little by little the situation degenerates, and more and more people die as the creatures find breaches in the big store windows. It’s a claustrophobic, tense narrative that seems to have no way out. David and the few people that seem to strive to keep their sanity are cornered by Mrs. Carmody’s followers, growing in number every hour. They decide they have to leave, even if it could mean certain death.

When the group leaves the store, they try and find a safe place, but end up driving around in a desolated, mysterious world completely changed by the new creatures roaming through it. Here, Darabont adopts a very different tone. Gone is the claustrophobia and the nervous tension of the store. The music is almost elegiac, there’s a sense of wonder and amazement at the vision of some of the gigantic creatures, as if the horror of the unknown gives place to the fascination of something we never thought possible. It’s one of the most beautiful and original tribute to nature seen in a long time, a great way to pay homage to Lovecraft’s cosmic pessimism by finding what makes it magic and beautiful. The new tone of the movie puts in perspective some of the previous scene. During the first break in of the flying monsters, Mrs. Carmody, majestically played by Marcia Gay Harden, survives certain death by not fighting with one of the monsters. We realize that these creatures are just like us, and can feel fear and react to it more than anything else. 

David finds his wife’s corpse, he sees his house destroyed. The five escapees in the car end up with no gas, in the middle of nowhere. They have a gun, and the first solution that crosses their mind is the most radical: looking around, chocked by the mist, no safe haven in sight, they decide to end their lives. But there are only four bullets for five people. David, our hero, decides to sacrifice himself. He kills the others, his sleeping child first. He finds himself alone in the mist, crying, in search of a way to end his own life. And just an instant later, a truck passes him by. It’s a group of survivors and militaries, going forward in the mist, fighting for a way to keep on going. We recognize a familiar face between the survivors: the woman that first left the convenience store. She’s with her children, alive and fighting. David is desperate, and the film ends. 

It’s a bleak ending, in a way. But it’s also the perfect conclusion for a movie that is ultimately about the same theme as Darabont’s breakthrough movie, The Shawshank Redemption: never stop the fight, keep on hoping and going forward. Darabont’s ending, different from King’s, is an ode to the beauty and the necessity of human will. The only people that achieve something good in the movie are the one with a positive attitude on the situation, fear and violence are always rewarded with more fear and violence. 

It’s one of the most positive movies of the last years, disguised as a bleak and scary horror piece. It’s a great work, one that reminds us of the power of metaphors, horror, fantasy. It’s a guide to how to approach hard times, one of the most relevant movies in recent memory. 

The Mist (IMDB)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 11, 2008 at 11:51 am and is filed under English, Movies with tags Darabont, Horror, Lovecraft, Marcia Gay Harden, Movies, Stephen King, the mist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.