Ill-named chiller by M. Night Shyamalan, not to be confused with the Swinging Sixties caper by Elliot Silverstein (title tune by the Supremes), unleashes a wave of inexplicable self-inflicted violence: a lunch-hour idler puncturing her carotid with a hair stick, a traffic cop turning his gun on himself, a steady rain of construction workers stepping off their girders into thin air. Biological terrorism is the natural first suspicion, but the proliferation of the phenomenon over several states in the Northeast points away from that theory. Could it be an airborne neurotoxin released by plants, a planet in revolt? Or perhaps something from another sort of plant, the nuclear-power type? Or something from a military experiment gone haywire? We know only enough to classify it as science fiction, doomsday division. And as in the filmmaker’s Signs, the arena of action shrinks to the small scale of a Fifties B-movie: an already uneasy married couple in flight from the center of Shyamalan’s universe, Philadelphia, by train, by car, by foot. Liberated (after Lady in the Water) from the obligation of a Surprise Ending, though still a victim of exorbitant expectations, he makes good use of Mark Wahlberg’s furrowed brow and Zooey Deschanel’s wide eyes; and the menace of ordinary trees, grasses, breezes is efficiently manufactured; and a couple of genuine chills are ultimately drummed up around the house of an inhospitable hermit. All in all, the film measures up well enough to his overrated best work, The Sixth Sense, at any rate when measured independent of box-office receipts, another area affected by exorbitant expectations. With John Leguizamo and Betty Buckley. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd