The plant toxins started affecting humans long before the suicides started.
How else to explain the proportion of people in this movie who were flat-out insane already? The old lady, the guys in the boarded-up house who shot those kids, Mr. "Hot dogs get a bad rap.", etc., etc...
- Have you read any dystopian, apocalyptic, or even post-apocalyptic literature? People will do what they can to survive, and sometimes that does in fact end up making them look crazy.
The Crazy Old Lady was responsible.
How much better the twist would have been if there was a scene where the old woman is ranting to the protagonists and she says "I don't like being around people, but plants? They've always been my friends. I'd rather talk to them than people. Sometimes I get so angry with people. That's why one time I just told my plant friends to just 'go ahead and kill everybody.' " She could be crazy, or she could have been responsible.
It was aliens!!
They were actually the ones doing it, instead of plants as people had assumed. And it wasn't just certain people affected, in the area EVERYONE became controlled, but there were two phases. The strong willed were affected with 'phase one' and killed themselves. But 'phase two' showed no symptoms until finally the aliens become ready to strike. And we don't see when they start attacking their fellow humans with all the knowledge and skill they normally have at the will of the aliens who wish to take over earth.- Adding to this: this was the work of the aliens from Signs, trying again after their disastrous first attempt at an invasion (having not accounted for the fact they were attacking a planet mostly composed of their Weaksauce Weaknesses). It didn't work this time either, because even with the passage of time, these aliens were still very very stupid and incompetent.
Elliot was unable to find work as a schoolteacher due to the number of teenagers and children who committed suicide
At the end he’s seeing Jess onto her bus for the first day of school at a time when one would assume he would be getting ready for classes himself.- I can think of two reasons why he might not be working.
1) Due to depopulation, people who have children are expected to stay home and raise the kids so that they can build their numbers back up.
2) His yearly review came up, and when the school caught wind that he was telling his students that a theory is just some random guess and we'll probably never know the real reason behind scientific phenomena, they canned him.
It was THE BEES!
The bees didn't die off. They just went to their secret headquarters and planned their revenge on the humans. This takes place somehow, somewhere in the Whoniverse
It makes no sense, but the bees go missing for a time in the Whoniverse as well.- Maybe this was another world event that Torchwood handled.
- No, this plot would actually make sense in the Whoniverse because bizarre sci-fi nonsense make sense there.
The movie itself was an experiment trying to get the audience to commit suicide
Life imitates art. The majority of people died when everyone panicked and started fleeing the cities.
Once people found out they were in areas where the happenings occurred, they started jumping into cars and hitting the road, and forget about traffic laws! The scene where people start fleeing the diner after the news report, for example.Not to mention all the people who freaked out when they saw people killing themselves. One imagines people running in front of cars, in a blind panic.
GLaDOS is behind all of this!
She somehow hooked herself up to all the plants in the world and started flooding the earth with neurotoxin!- Or it was just an airborne toxin, and when people started blaming pants, GLaDOS didn't have the ability or the inclination to correct them.
This movie and the remake of The Wicker Man take place in the same Universe.
The women on the island in the Nic Cage version of The Wicker Man are certain that their honey harvest suffered last year because of the lack of a proper sacrifice (or something, I wasn't paying attention). It was actually because of all the disappearing bees that Mark Wahlberg mentioned at the beginning of The Happening. The women on the island probably hadn't heard of either event, being isolated on their insular island, and Nic Cage was too busy tumbling into the depths of depression and punching out women to explain. The movie takes place in the Marvel Universe
Thanos is testing out his Infinity Gauntlet or his Cosmic Cube, and causing the mass suicides to appease his mistress Death. It makes more sense than the plants being responsible.
The movie takes place in the DCU
And the plants beeing sentient and developing the ability to evolve was all a plot by Poison Ivy. It wasnt the power of love that defeated the aliens The Goddamn Batman fixed the problem- Actually something like this DID happen once in DC Comics, when the vegetable supervillain Floronic Man, having gained "contact" with the collective consciousness of all plants, convinces them to overload the atmosphere with- oxygen, which would kill all humans (and every other oxygen-breathing lifeform.) He is defeated only when Swamp Thing points out that without those lifeforms, the plants would not be able to breath, either (since their breathing makes the carbon dioxide that the plants need.) A point a elementary school child could have made...
- So that would mean it was Swamp Thing who saved the Earth. Not the power of love.
This movie is the prequel to Interstellar.
The bees disappearing caused the crop failures and the food riots. The plant attacks were the first wave of depopulation. It also explains where the science teachers not teaching science correctly started. The Blight is the primordial bacteria mentioned here. This movie is part of the Unbreakable Universe.
Elliot is the one causing everything to happen, his relationship when unstable causes people within a certain radius to act weird, including himself.