‘The Mist’ a frustrating sideshow of misery

“Heaven and Earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs; the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs. Is not the space between Heaven and Earth like a bellows?”

— The Tao Te Ching

In examining this quote, some have interpreted “ruthless” to mean “impartial” or “indifferent,” going so far as to translate it as such—but I suspect that “The Mist” would not be a member of that group, it being a film that finds heaven, earth, sages and all of humanity so ruthless that it would probably italicize that word, put it in bold font and underline it three times. The film works in every way that a good horror film should on the strictest level of a well-oiled machine—the chilling atmosphere, the ever-looming sense of dread—but I am extremely wary to recommend it on the basis of its essential thesis. To wit: hopeless situations are completely, utterly hopeless and not worth hope, but the only way that they become more hopeless is if you lose hope. At this particular point in my life, I don’t believe that it’s possible to subscribe to the all-encompassing idea that “humanity is essentially good”—a concept that “The Mist” introduces on its own, more or less word-for-word, as a straw man argument that is promptly knocked down. But I do know that the film exudes nothing but childish woe—so eager to throw up a middle finger in every direction that it barely has any inclination to see where it’s pointing.

I have not read “The Mist,” the Stephen King novella upon which this film is based, but this incarnation of the story imprints his brand on it pretty early in the game with a smirking acknowledgment of the author’s propensity to project himself onto his protagonists—in this case, graphic artist David Drayton (Thomas Jane), who is painting a poster for “The Dark Tower” as we meet him. (It’s really the only bit of self-reflective humor in the entire film, which is a shame, because it could use a little more of it.) The arrival of a hellish storm brings with it an ominous mist, quickly spreading across the nearby lake. But while the town is more interested in stocking up on supplies at the local supermarket, the mist overtakes the countryside, and something becomes readily apparent: there’s something deadly about it. The store performs a makeshift emergency lockdown, and those left inside comprise a rather unhealthy mixture of locals and out-of-towners, friends and enemies, the atheistic and the religious. They can’t seem to agree on what to do, or even what’s out there—and so they become a rather convenient metaphor for the population of the whole wide world in an end-of-days scenario.

Frankly, it’s more than a little heavy handed, as Drayton comes to realize that no matter what monsters may lurk in the mist, well, gee golly gosh, humanity does a pretty good job of acting the monster itself. But then you have the strange case of Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), the group’s resident self-righteous sermonizer, whom I first feared was much too cartoonish to serve as any real indictment of organized religion, as increasingly outrageous and horrific deaths slowly bring more and more of the supermarket’s denizens into her extremist flock. Religion would indeed become the knee-jerk refuge of many during such a widespread, unknowable disaster (Biblical or not), but somehow it seems a little too easy and one-dimensional to deliver anything cutting. That all changed near the end of the flick, however, when the “non-believers”—in their desire to escape her overzealous wrath—inadvertently complete the natural cycle of Carmody’s ever-growing Christ complex. It’s a bold move that not only plays directly into Carmody’s hands, but intelligently calls into question the entire history of Christianity itself, opening up the possibility that its genesis was the result of some frightened power struggle of similarly mad proportions.

It’s through this saddening revelation that you realize that perhaps, in its generally pessimistic tone, “The Mist” only wants us to look long and hard at the “civilized world” that we take for granted. But then comes that pesky ending, which states its intentions clearly enough. Ending on a dark, contemplative note is one matter, but in what seems like a direct inverse of Spielberg’s forcibly cheerful “War of the Worlds,” another blue-tinted invasion film, “The Mist” ends on a note of such bone-crushing despair and prefab irony that it doesn’t really question anything so much as it just retracts into a ball of contempt and prays that someone will just end its misery soon. A movie like “No Country for Old Men” recognizes how big and terrifying this world can be for a species that hasn’t even figured itself out yet, but it has the bravery to really examine those concepts—compare that to “The Mist’s” disinterested dismissal of anything and everything, and you’ll find that there really is no comparison.