YOU can't say that M Night Shyamalan doesn't generate chills. It's two years since his prolonged, pretentious fairytale The Lady In The Water took a swan dive into an empty pool, and now just the words "Written, Directed and Produced by" are enough to strike fear in the heart of man – or at least a strong sense of déjà vu. Will I ever get back the two hours expended on The Village? Can I still be spooked by banging doors? In short: can I get through another inert session seeing dead movies?

Now the most idiosyncratic mainstream director in the world is hoping that his new apocalyptic film, The Happening, will bring his reputation back to life. Like Shyamalan's previous movies The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs and, especially, The Village, The Happening is a trip to the Twilight Zone, building suspense by withholding info. Down in Central Park, there's something in the air that causes anyone infected to stop what they're doing, take a step or so backwards and then kill themselves by surrendering to the most convenient form of suicide – jumping off a construction site, climbing into a cageful of lions, sticking a hat pin in your neck or lying down in a field in front of a giant mower.

Even in New York, this is odd behaviour. At first, it is thought to be a terrorist attack and everyone runs for cover, despite not knowing what sort of cover they should be seeking. Among the refugees are science teacher Elliot Moore (Mark Wahlberg), his young wife Alma (Zooey Deschanel), his friend Julian (John Leguizamo), and his quiet eight-year-old, Jess (Ashlyn Sanchez), who flee to the countryside. As the world descends into self-destruction, an unscheduled train stop strands them. "We're in a small town," Elliot reassures, "nothing will happen to us here." You quickly learn that whenever anyone has that kind of iron-clad certainty in The Happening, the exact opposite is true.

All this would be suitably unnerving – except the shock we're waiting for simply doesn't come, because there's not really much Happening apart from people bumping themselves off in increasingly bleakly comic ways. Rather than a simple tale of good and evil with a universal moral, the film is a convoluted example of evasive logic, and the rules seem arbitrary, contradictory and based on whim. For instance, if the killing impulse is carried by the wind, why don't people in the affected area just stay indoors with the windows sealed and wait it out, instead of running to the open spaces of the countryside? And given that humankind as we know it may be wiped out, how interested are we in the subplot about Mark and his screen wife splitting up because his missus shared dessert with another man? Even Betty Buckley as a religious recluse who offers the travellers shelter turns out to be a mixed blessing, because she's such an over-the-top nut job, she brings the entire movie to a standstill.

The Happening is at its most ridiculous when Wahlberg's Elliot starts talking to a pot plant in a bid to prevent a potential attack of poisonous toxins. Let's face it, trying to make vegetation seem threatening only really works if you're dealing with Triffids.

Even though it's about 90 minutes, this feels like quite a plodding, preachy eco-film – as if George A Romero was invited to direct An Inconvenient Truth. Indeed the noble truth is that M Night Shyamalan's new thriller isn't that bad. But the awful truth is that it's not really that good, either, just a tame and tepid puzzlement.

• On general release from Friday