Before Mike Flanagan became the person Stephen King trusted to bring his work to screens big and small, there was Frank Darabont. Darabont’s calling card was a short film based on King’s “The Woman in the Room”, but his big successes were with King’s non-Horror work, The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. Adapting The Mist would take Darabont’s skill with a large ensemble of characters deeper into King’s Horror storytelling. The film has a lot of fans, especially when it comes to finding good Horror films from the 2000s, but I am not one of them. The creature feature stuff is fine, though the effects often show the problem of that decade’s early digital work. What surprised me were two of the performances by good actors. Andre Braugher has to hammer a note of denial long past when he should have accepted the reality, and Marcia Gay Harden’s religious nut really got on my nerves. I get that’s the point of the character, but you can be effective and you can be overly effective, and she quickly becomes the person in the group you not only can’t wait to see not survive, you wonder what’s taking so long.
I guess I should note the ending which sharply divided initial viewers. I didn’t mind it. If it didn’t happen that way I think it would’ve felt like a studio note rewriting a pessimistic ending. Also, I think the journey through the mist is the most visually splendid sequence of the film.
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