If the road to movie hell is paved with good intentions, M. Night Shyamalan is getting pretty close to his destination. The well-compensated writer-director’s new eco-thriller, “The Happening,” takes retribution for human destructiveness to a new level of absurdity.

Toying with the ingrained human instinct for survival, “The Happening” depicts a viral outbreak that causes humans to kill themselves. Beginning in Central Park and supposed to be a terrorist attack, the contagion quickly spreads throughout the Northeast, devastating the human population in its path.

Those who come into contact with the airborne disease become dizzy and disoriented, then search around for the closest method of killing themselves. The resulting carnage, which has earned Mr. Shyamalan his first R rating, is intended to terrify, but it often zooms right past horror into farce.

Since hitting pay dirt with “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, Mr. Shyamalan has taken his otherworldly, twist-at-the-end formula to the bank. Famously dismissive of critics, the director is fond of noting the financial success of his films (“The Sixth Sense” earned more than $600 million worldwide for Disney). But his trusty formula of mystical plotlines, wise children, and surprise endings has brought in shrinking revenues; his last feature, “The Lady in the Water,” made just $42 million domestically and was universally panned. “The Happening” is not likely to fare much better.

Mr. Shyamalan has said that he writes B movies with A-list talent, camerawork, and style, but no amount of beautiful faces and quality cinematography can save “The Happening” from self-destruction. With his pick of Hollywood veterans, Mr. Shyamalan often manages to temper some of his stilted dialogue and stretched plot points with interesting performances. Mel Gibson and Bruce Willis added depth to his plots in “Signs” and “Unbreakable,” respectively, while Paul Giamatti did his best to keep “The Lady in the Water” out of straight-to-video territory.

Here, Zooey Deschanel brings an effortless wit and naturalism to Mr. Shyamalan’s mannered style, but this is Mark Wahlberg’s movie, and the actor does not fare well within his director’s eerie confines.

Mr. Wahlberg plumbed reasonable depths of aggression and egotism in films from “The Departed” to “Boogie Nights,” but “introspective” and “thoughtful” do not appear to be emotions within his grasp. In “The Happening,” his middle-school teacher, Elliot Moore, seems ever ready to pounce, and the one thing he can’t do is teach. Elliot’s skills at deduction are meant to be evident in his first scene, but he talks to his students as though they are foreign and speaking slowly will make them understand English.

When news of the outbreak in Central Park hits his school, Elliot makes plans to get out of Philadelphia with his wife, Alma (Ms. Deschanel), a co-worker, Julian (John Leguizamo), and Julian’s daughter, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez). But no sooner have they boarded a train to Julian’s mother’s house than they learn that the outbreak is spreading. Their train dumps them out into the middle of nowhere, where they must rely on Elliot’s strategic skills and the slowly trickling information that they have to survive.

Mr. Shyamalan’s attempt to explore the limits of science and human dominance here may be altruistic, but the happening in “The Happening” is so vaguely conceived and executed that it completely fails to hold the audience’s anticipation for its conclusion. In place of the eerie silences that maintained an aura of terror in “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs,” “The Happening” manages only comical gore and nonsensically violent sequences. The film is littered with bodies wandering aimlessly toward their own demise, often warranting derisive laughter rather than screams.

Elliot eludes the virus by luck more than intellect, and the film’s conclusion offers no insight into the sequence of events that have transpired. In the end, Mr. Shyamalan’s talent for building paranoid anticipation evades him, and without a coherent explanation or methodology for why the happening is happening, the film backfires. The script attempts to demonstrate and comment on the consequences of unchecked human expansion, but it could easily leave audiences drooling over the real estate prospects that the conclusion depicts in formerly high-density populations such as New York City.