M. Night Shyamalan
E venne il giorno

"In every one of my films, there is always faith, even if it's not visible on the surface, even if it's not directly talked about. What matters to me is that the film evokes deep emotions. My films usually don't go unnoticed: they are either loved or strongly hated."

This is how Manoj Night Shyamalan expressed himself at the press conference regarding his latest feature film, "The Happening", translated into Italian with the convincing title "E venne il giorno", topping the Italian box office a week after its release in theaters, ready to dispel the rumors of a creative crisis that followed the stumbling and peculiar "Lady in the Water".
Those still expecting, almost ten years later, a new "The Sixth Sense" will be, let's say it right away, rather disappointed. From a directorial perspective, as well as in terms of screenplay, the film fails to rise to the level of the author's debut work, nor to that of "Signs", another great film that initially had many similarities with the plot of this latest film. Even the much-vaunted violent scenes previewed in the age-restricted trailer circulating on YouTube turn out to be rather bland compared to the adrenaline-pumping, more than visual, violence of the first film by the Indian-origin director. What interests Shyamalan, in this work as in others, is actually analyzing the psychology of a man facing the unknown, the unformed, the Stranger, whose main characteristic, the otherness, can be - or not - accompanied by a "form" so to speak, terrifying.
If in "The Sixth Sense" the stranger was the ghost, a corporeal, human, desperate ghost, and in "Signs" the alien, the quintessential Other, here the main enemy seems to be nature - the plants, in all their forms, which by the end of the film will appear to us as grotesque, monstrous, alive (which is already a great achievement). If the director's plan was to make us not understand it immediately, we can safely say he didn't succeed because there's no true revelation, no real twist, and from the beginning, it's easily apparent that what causes the mass suicides - because that's what the film is about, for those who don't know - is a toxin spread in the air by trees and bushes, a sort of defense weapon against the "bad" human who pollutes the planet and has no respect for nature (and this ecological aspect is perhaps the weakest and most rhetorical part of the entire film, even if fortunately it is not too emphasized).
The wave of fear generated by the news spread solely by the media (the American army appears here weak, unprepared to face and manage the crisis) drives people to flee from the coastal cities of the United States, all under attack. As I was rightly pointed out, one can safely say that contaminated people stop living, stop being human the very moment they are stricken, as they spontaneously take their own lives. Following the news that Philadelphia may also be at risk, Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), a science teacher, decides to head towards more inland regions with his wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), with whom he is in crisis, best friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and his daughter, Jess. They soon discover that the infection area, previously limited to coastal cities, is rapidly expanding to smaller towns and rural homes. It becomes clear that those hit by the toxin can no longer regain their senses and end up killing themselves, with neither the army nor the media able to provide an answer to all this. Elliot thus finds himself forced to take care of his loved ones in an increasingly isolated environment - and in this the climax of the second part of the film is truly well thought out - gradually realizing that escaping from danger, death, and fear also means reclaiming, regaining that which makes life worth living, namely love (which, as Shyamalan rightly stated, is a central theme in his films, fundamental in all the scripts he has written).
Paranoid visions and behaviors resurface in individuals under attack, a clear parallel with the recent "The Village", the fear of the different re-emerges, often taking on irrational and even murderous tones (I refer to the scene of the barricaded house). Above all, that relationship with space re-emerges, which has always marked all of Shyamalan's films (with the exception of "Unbreakable"): an ever-increasing restriction of space in the first part of the film, which always finds its peak when Elliot, Alma, and Jess barricade themselves in the old farmer's house, and an attempt to open up, go out into the world in the final part, culminating in the great beautiful scene (which I won't spoil) where Elliot decides to reach Alma and Jess by crossing the garden - a sort of rebirth, an affirmation of life. The symbolism of the house violated by an external organism, clearly "uterine", as in "Signs" and "The Sixth Sense", and the attempt to courageously reclaim the outside world and what is precious and important in it, remains probably the fundamental, deepest element of M. Night Shyamalan, the one that allows us to forgive him where the shots and direction are less polished than usual, where the tension doesn't always rise and fall as it should, where perhaps some small details could have played a different role, more filled with meaning, just as the death of the wife takes on the tone of a reckoning with destiny in "Signs".
Well supported by the highly talented and underrated Mark Wahlberg and the beautiful and charismatic Zooey Deschanel (an actress I personally adore, as an aesthete), Shyamalan reconstructs a path of rebirth and overcoming fear which once again has love as its counterpart, that is, the courage that prevents human beings from being barricaded in a restricted, compromising, and falsely reassuring universe, leading them to take risks because taking a risk is perhaps equivalent to affirming the deepest side of human nature.