"The Mist" is thick with disturbing ideas

"Stephen King's The Mist" might be one of the most grotesquely fascinating, depressing and anger-inducing films this year - or this decade, even.

The basic concept of this film is nothing new. A doom crier says "something is coming," and then - almost immediately - that something is upon a fairly diverse group of individuals who become trapped together. King has done this before - most similarly (on the surface, anyway) with the TV mini-series "Storm of the Century" (1999). Only then, the "something" was both snow and the evil Andre Linoge. King also brought us "The Stand," a 1994 mini-series with people deciding between right and wrong in which the "something" was, in addition to an actual plague, the devil incarnate Randall Flagg. But the "something" is different in "The Mist" - because the real enemy isn't the actual mist covering the town, or the tentacles and bugs that emerge from the mist but what people will do to each other when cut off from civilization and faced with almost certain death.

Director and screenwriter Frank Darabont ("The Shawshank Redemption" and "The Green Mile") adapted King's novella in which the wake of a storm drives a rural Maine village resident David Drayton (Thomas Jane) to journey into town with his young son, Billy (Nathan Gamble), to purchase emergency supplies. His uppity, citified neighbor, Brent Norton (Andre Braugher), tags along. David and Brent shop for supplies at the grocery store, where everyone else from the area is stocking up as well. But something goes horribly wrong.

A trusted local runs in to say "There's something in the mist," moments before the mist covers the store. When his theory is tested, it's clear this is no ordinary mist - it has tentacles and malice. Some believe this might be the result of something the military is doing in the area and calling the "Arrowhead Project," but others have less plausible ideas.

David, along with several of the store's inhabitants and its assistant manager, Ollie (Toby Jones), try figuring out a way to get rescued. Local religious zealot Mrs. Carmody (Marcia Gay Harden) is quick to decide that the mist is a Biblical plague. The appearance of giant bugs, including spiders with faces like evil skeletons, is in her opinion only proof of her case - which she uses to start whipping the more impressionable store dwellers into a frenzy. This frenzy is the beginning of the end for many in this film. Much more dangerous than the tentacles, bugs and zero visibility is the mentality of people who want something to believe in - and those who've lost all hope.

Jane, Jones and Harden are outstanding in this film. The mist's creatures are more startling for their modest screen time, and the film has several other interesting, sympathetic characters that give us reasons to hope we'll see a light at the end of the disaster - as we have in "The Storm of the Century" and "The Stand," where some people die but good wins out overall.

"Stephen King's The Mist" is rated R for violence, terror, gore and language. But what the MPAA rating, TV advertisements and trailers fail to warn viewers is of the darkness this film contains. We've been waiting for a horror film with suspense instead of empty scares and gore with emotional impact rather than just a gross-out factor - "The Mist" may be one of the most intense psychological thrillers of the decade. But it's also one of the most disturbing, and should be approached with caution. And not at all by sensitive viewers.

Originally published in The Chronicle on December 7, 2007