The Mist is an entertaining horror/suspense romp with pretensions of social commentary and a film that wants to be a cautionary fable with a haunting ending.  It mostly succeeds.  It’s based on a Stephen King story (and features many of his trademarks) and is written and directed by the excellent Frank Darabont.  The film works best though as a wildly exciting creature feature with lots of gore and good performances from many of the actors in the film.  I think the film tries too hard at times but I enjoyed it and it certainly deserved a better fate than it received at the domestic box office, where it went largely ignored.

Brooding Tom Jane (The Punisher) plays an artist named David Drayton who lives in small town Maine with his wife and son.   After a bad storm, he drives to the local grocery store with his son and a neighbor,  a lawyer named Brent (Andre Braugher, hamming it up as a big city liberal lawyer….we can guess his fate immediately) who has had a strained relationship with Drayton.  A mysterious fog covers the town (with otherworldly bugs and creatures great and small) and traps the townsfolk in the store, where they turn on each other in short order.  Marcia Gay Harden steals scenes (chomping on the scenery) as the sinister religious lunatic Mrs. Carmody, who turns the people to her way of thinking.  This is Stephen King commenting on how people can warp religion to fit their own sinister motives.  She believes the mist is God’s wraith against sinners and liberals.  Mrs. Carmody may be a cartoonish figure, but she’s not much different from the evil religious right who warns people not to see fantasy films with CGI polar bears and would like to see gay people put in camps and quarantined, like their new-found hero, republican presidential nominee Mike Huckabee. 

The film is filled with strong support all around, including creepy dwarf Toby Jones (credit: Magnus from MM) and a lot of the other excellent supporting players.

The Mist is well-made and entertaining and only falters in some of its special effects (early on, some of the creatures wer a bit too obviously CG, but the effects improved as the film went along) and its explanation of the mist and what caused it.  The fact that some of the special effects are not great is forgivable though because the film was made on a tight 18 million dollar budget.  I also felt that while the ending was ballsy, it was grim and depressing and probably hurt the box office of the film.  No one can accuse Darabont of going soft or selling out with the ending, but I would have preferred if it went another way.  The Mist is a solid, if mixed success.

 Film Grade: B

• Tweet