Terrible things are "Happening": A girl in Central Park calmly punctures her own jugular vein. A cop shoots himself in the head. High-rise construction workers start falling -- or jumping? -- in batches to the ground. A guy at the zoo feeds his own arms to the lions.

The culprit, it seems, is a heinous airborne toxin that blocks neurotransmitters to the human brain. The first stage is mental confusion. The second is spacial disorientation. The third is an irrational suicidal impulse.

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'The Happening'

2 stars = Mediocre
Ratings explained

• Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Zooey Deschanel.
• Rating: R for violent and disturbing images

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I myself have all those symptoms, with no airborne toxin to blame them on. But in writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's thriller, it's a collective natural disaster rather than a private psychiatric matter, prompting the evacuation of New York and Philadelphia.

"Looks like it's not occurring 90 miles from here," says some Eyewitness News anchor, which leads Philly science teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg) and his spacey wife, Alma (Zooey Deschanel), to hop a crowded refugee train headed west, with Elliot's teacher pal Julian (John Leguizamo) and Julian's young daughter, Jessica.

Julian, however, makes the sudden insane decision to leave Jessica with Elliot and Alma ("I'm gonna go get Mommy and come right back and find you!"), as the schmaltzy music -- and my headache -- swells.

Now stuck with the kid in addition to the problematic wife and preexisting marital strain, Elliot deduces that those deadly neurotoxins are carried by the wind and that their source is -- plants. Hostile plants and trees -- they don't mind a human being or two, but something about large groups really ticks them off. When that happens, everybody who breathes the air acts like George Romero's zombies -- briefly, before killing themselves.

The creepy villain-victims include Mrs. Jones (Betty Buckley), who gives Elliot sanctuary but talks suspiciously to her plants. There's more than one plant-talker here, plus an egghead expert on the subject from Carnegie Mellon University.

Wahlberg and Deschanel (with her weirdly huge blue eyes) process their marital issues while the virus rampages. Can love conquer neurotoxins?

The intrusive music keeps suggesting yes. Logic keeps suggesting you gotta be crazy to buy any of this nonsense, despite cinematographer Tak Fujimato's stunning images. After the enormous success of "Sixth Sense," director Shyamalan -- once dubbed "The Next Spielberg" by Newsweek -- has concocted a script even worse than those subsequently written for "Signs" and "Lady in the Water."

This hapless "Happening" starts out scary but fizzles into a premise without a payoff.

On the other hand, I'll never be quite as comfortable with my rhododendron as I used to be.