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The Mist
(R)

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"Out-of-towner" David Drayton (Thomas Jane, left) tries to get a handle on whatever's out there.
"It's the end of the world!" says a character in one of the great sequences in Alfred Hitchcock's apocalyptic classic The Birds. Doomsday is right at the doorstep, too, in The Mist, a go-for-the-throat disaster horror movie based on a Stephen King novella and adapted and directed by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile). The action and thrills are set almost entirely in a supermarket and pharmacy where inhabitants of a picturesque seaside town are trapped by a massive cloud that harbors relentlessly cranky monsters -- flesh-shredding, winged prehistoric beasties among them -- against which the townies fight for their lives.

Dad does what he can to keep his son (Nathan Gamble) out of harm's way.
Darabont's reworking of the material into a harrowing character study of how quickly fear and panic erode the thin veneer we call "civilization" and exposes mankind as insane, easily manipulated and recklessly destructive really packs a punch. Along the way, his script alludes pointedly to the Iraq invasion, the manipulation of the "war on terror," fundamentalist religion and other ugly facets of the way we live now. Although few will go to The Mist for its acting, Thomas Jane, Laurie Holden, Andre Braugher, Frances Sternhagen, Toby Jones and young Nathan Gamble more than hold their own against the special effects, let alone some lapses of credibility that can't be disguised by smoke and mirrors. Marcia Gay Harden has a field day playing the town's ultra-religious doomsayer who morphs into a dangerous, manipulative menace, cloaking her ugly agenda behind Christian piety. What may be most startling about The Mist, though, is its unflinching bleakness. Nobody, certainly not the government, comes riding to the rescue. It all wasn't just a bad dream. And, unlike the simpering finale of another entry into the end-of-the-world canon, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, the horror simply doesn't just end one day.

by Stephen Rebello

photo credit: Ralph Nelson, The Weinstein Company, 2007

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