Mist, The

Trapped in a supermarket by a mysterious fog, a group of ordinary people come under threat from monstrous creatures - and their own prejudice and fear. A tense adaptation of a Stephen King horror story, from the writer-director of The Shawshank Redemption
Any viewers of The Mist expecting a slice of hard-edged but traditional Hollywood storytelling in the manner of Frank Darabont's other Stephen King adaptations should prepare for a surprise. He may have set down a very deliberate directorial style in The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile (as well as in his unsuccessful 2001 Jim Carrey drama The Majestic), but here Darabont has embraced an aggressively different and much grittier approach to filmmaking. It's worth remembering that he got his first break in the film industry writing screenplays for gory 1980s horror movies like The Fly II. Now, with his fourth movie as director, he's ignored current trends in fright filmmaking in favour of a more old-fashioned dose of gruelling, deliberately nasty horror, but with the emphasis firmly on the characters and a bleak tone strongly reminiscent of John Carpenter's remake of The Thing. Adapted from one of horror author King's best-loved tales, the story unfolds in the sleepy town of Castle Rock (a traditional setting for his stories), where movie poster artist David Drayton (Jane) is making a trip to the local supermarket with his young son (Gamble) to pick up some supplies. In the wake of a storm, a large proportion of the town are also there - but then, a sinister mist descends from the mountains and obscures everything in sight. Moments later, a local man sprints inside, wounded and claiming to have been attacked by 'something' out in the indistinct gloom. Trapped inside the store, the townsfolk's first instinct is to stay put and wait for help to arrive. However, divisions soon appear, old arguments and grudges rear their head, and then the supermarket comes under attack from monstrous, impossible creatures lurking within the mist. The assaults from these creatures become increasingly dangerous, but an even bigger threat may come from their fellow townsfolk, as local spinster and religious zealot Mrs Carmody (Harden) interprets their situation as the wrath of God, and is soon turning the survivors against each other. As with the 2007 King adaptation 1408, it's something of a relief to find a horror movie that isn't interested in chasing the teen demographic and which spends just as much time on its characterisation as on its impressive scares. The Mist is aided in this by Darabont's deliberately loose directorial style (influenced by his work directing an episode of 'The Shield'), with the hand-held camerawork giving a real sense of immediacy and keeping the drama anchored in realism - even in the more overtly creature-feature sequences. Much of this was necessary thanks to the film's relatively low budget but the lack of slickness helps immeasurably and builds a genuine level of tension and foreboding. The fine work from the cast means that the characters come across as believable human beings and makes the violent deaths that occur even more affecting, but Darabont runs into some problems with his chief villain. Marcia Gay Harden is exceptionally creepy as Mrs Carmody but the character's journey towards all-out religious mania is a little too swift and unsympathetic (a problem that stems from the source material), leading to a few moments in the last half hour that border on over-the-top. For the most part, The Mist is a finely tuned exercise in menace that captures the spirit of the original King story, as well as delivering plenty of visceral shocks. The first 15 minutes is a bravura example of concise storytelling, introducing a large number of characters and setting the pieces in place before the titular fog descends, while Darabont is also good at cranking up the intensity. The initial attack from a series of flesh-tearing tentacles is brilliantly done, while the skin-crawling pharmacy sequence will cause major problems for any arachnophobes in the audience. Aside from a couple of weak moments (most notably in a brief shot of a rubbery-looking tentacle), the CGI and make-up effects are excellently done and there are plenty of nightmarish sights thanks to the monsters in the mist. However, the film's real horror comes from its fantastically bleak look at the human condition, showing that humanity's capability for savagery and violence is more frightening than anything lurking outside the supermarket. The characters go through all kinds of arguments, unexpected bonding and irrational behaviour, and the film makes it all too clear that if only they could get past their fears and work together, they could survive - while also showing how impossible that is, and how easy it is for seemingly normal people to fall prey to religious fanaticism. Darabont's screenplay is a little too explicit in one dialogue sequence, spelling out the subtext far too clearly, but elsewhere he goes for the slow burn, and the result is a claustrophobic and fearsomely gripping movie that's prepared to be downright violent and nasty when it needs to be. While it's incredibly close in tone to King's original novella, fans of the story may be surprised when the film carries on past King's ambiguous original climax. As with The Shawshank Redemption, Darabont has changed the ending to give it more of a sense of closure, but here the changes are a lot more significant. They're also far darker and while the new climax gives the story a genuine ending, it feels a little too convenient and calculated. It also makes the mistake of topping an already harrowing and downbeat two hours with an absolute downer of a finale, but while The Mist may be far from the polished near-perfection of Shawshank, it's still an impressively angry horror film that rests comfortably in the upper tier of King movie adaptations.
Verdict For those who like their horror old-school and centred on character, The Mist is an effectively nasty tale of claustrophobic terror, even if the finale pushes the bleakness just a little too far.