Review: Stephen King's The Mist (2007)

(NOTE: The following review was originally written for a movie review website to which I used to contribute an essay or two a month for about a year.)

I always preferred Stephen King’s short stories to his novels—all the character development and salty dialogue with a lot less rambling and wheel-spinning—and one of his most evocative shorter works is “The Mist,” a novella in which a violent storm damages a military base where some pretty freaky, ultimately unwise transdimensional experiments are being conducted, turning loose a fog bank filled with Lovecraftian nightmares on a small Maine town.

The first time I read “The Mist,” I was working as a freelance proofreader in an office building that afforded a perfect view of Chicago’s northern lakefront. As I read between assignments, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the shoreline was rapidly fading from view—fog was rolling down the shoreline, swallowing first the suburbs in the far distance, then Lincoln Park and the attached beaches, then Oak Street Beach just a couple of blocks away and the Drake Hotel. Everything had been enveloped in a wave impenetrable white.

I put the book down and found some other way to entertain myself while the weather cleared up.

Writer/director Frank Darabont, who has adapted King’s work for the big screen before (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile), is an ideal choice for this material. He has a firm understanding of the rhythms of King’s storytelling and verbiage and the strong visual sense to realize King’s frightening visions on screen.

What Darabont doesn’t have, unfortunately, is the ability to step back and objectively spy opportunities to prune King’s source material and ratchet up the tension.

He gets off to a good enough start, introducing key characters and situations with efficiency. David Drayton (Thomas Jane) needs to pick up supplies and groceries in town and takes his young son Billy (Nathan Gamble) and crank next-door neighbor Brent (Andre Braugher) with him. He’s in the local supermarket with an assortment of other characters—including Irene (Frances Sternhagen), an elderly teacher; Amanda (Laurie Holden), a young, pretty newcomer; Ollie (Toby Jones), a smart clerk; a couple of dim locals (William Sadler and David Jensen) and Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden), a misanthropic religious fanatic—when the mist overspreads the area and nasty things begin happening to anyone unfortunate enough to be out in it. Some believe there’s something lethal just beyond the sightline, especially after a stock boy gets dragged off and eaten by tentacles (“What are those tentacles even attached to?” David wonders), but others, like Brent, refuse to believe any such nonsense and believe they should run for help, while Mrs. Carmody spouts about the wrath of God and blood sacrifice. Most trapped in the supermarket think she’s coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs, but after a few more deadly encounters with the otherworldly inhabitants of the mist, her talk of expiation starts sounding less and less crazy to some trapped in the store.

It’s the space between those deadly encounters where The Mist suffers most, though this space does allow the scares to carry more weight (rather than wearing the audience down with one shock after another) and provides plenty of room for the exploration of the ways in social order progresses, regresses, collapses and reforms into something much more ugly under the strain of disaster beyond comprehension. But while there’s opportunity aplenty for character development in these stretches there’s precious little, with lots of talking—or, rather, shouted threats and accusations from members of one faction at another.

Worst of the bunch is Mrs. Carmody, who’s such a crackpot from her first line on that even an actress as talented as Marcia Gay Harden can only make her seem remotely human; even the finest musician in the world can only do so much with a guitar that has only one string.

The Mist does indeed have some good fright moments, especially when the transdimensional horrors are only suggested (like when they press against a closed loading dock door or when seen as silhouettes through the haze), and its commentary on mob action is perfectly valid. But Darabont’s rigid adherence to King’s original story (with the exception of the ending, which Darabont expands to admittedly heartbreaking effect) causes the movie to tread water when it should move steadily forward, allowing carefully built tension to ease and ultimately dissipate. The time between fights with monsters could have either been cut down or put to better use, like more character development so we’d care more about their eventual fates.

The Mist is a good movie—and one of the best adaptations of King’s work, which has often suffered in less skilled hands. With some tightening, though, it could have been a great movie.