Universal Pictures
If you follow the movies and the people who make them, you are well aware of the spotty career of one-time wunderkind M. Night Shyamalan who hit it big with The Sixth Sense, divided audiences with Unbreakable, came back with the mostly well-received Signs, then started going off the rails with The Village and Lady in the Water (which have their fans and detractors) before finally hitting rock bottom with the reviled The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth. The one bright spot on Shyamalan’s recent resumé is the FOX event series Wayward Pines (even if it too began to go off the rails towards the end).
With The Visit, many are hailing it as Shyamalan’s cinematic redemption … but is it? The story is fairly simple, and has obvious fairy tale overtones, as two teenagers are sent to their grandparents’ house for a week while mom goes on a cruise with her new-ish boyfriend. The interesting part of this premise is that the kids have never met their grandparents because mom (played by Kathryn Hahn) left home when she was 19 and never went back, even after they tried to reach out to her. And she’s never told her kids why she left and has refused to speak to them.
But, some contact was finally made as they requested to meet their grandchildren and the timing was perfect for everyone. When the kids, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) arrive, everything seems normal. Nana (Deanna Dunagan) bakes cookies and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) putters around, but the kids are told about one house rule — bedtime is 9:30, because they’re old people. Confined to their room at night, the kids hear strange noises outside the door and discover Nana doing some very odd things. Pop Pop later tells them that she has a condition called “sundowning” which is a form of dementia that occurs after dark. But odd things begin to happen with both grandparents during the daytime as well, making the kids fear for their lives, especially when Pop Pop starts talking about ghosts and aliens waiting for them in the field.
I suppose most people feel Shyamalan is back because this is a movie with a “twist.” Are there spirits or aliens actually waiting for them? Are Nana and Pop Pop possessed or aliens in disguise, or is there another answer to their bizarre behavior? The answer should be obvious to most viewers long before it is revealed (and I’m not usually one to think ahead to the twist reveal.)
While The Visit is entertaining in its way, it has some serious tonal issues that I’m not quite sure are on purpose. The movie has been advertised as a horrifying thriller, but most of the audience members at the screening were laughing at things that should have been scary. Even after talking with a few people, there’s still a question as to whether Shyamalan was intentionally making a horror-comedy, or if that should now be the story he’s sticking to. There are also a few plot holes like how Pop Pop knows Tyler is a germaphobe at a key moment when it’s never been addressed between the two on screen. If there is a moment that depends on that particular plot device, it should have been mentioned at some point (we know Tyler is a germaphobe, but it’s never brought up to Pop Pop).
I also wasn’t too keen on Shyamalan’s choice to make this a sort of “found footage” type of film, with Becca documenting the trip as a way to bring some forgiveness to her divided family members. A large part of the movie is shot with extremely shaky camerawork that may have some audience members’ heads and stomachs spinning. For my tastes, I would have preferred a traditional filmic narrative style that played more on the fairy tale aspects of the story. (And I don’t care how devoted you are to your craft, you’re not going to keep pointing a camera towards your face as you’re running in terror from someone, and every person you run into isn’t going to be an actor eager to break into a dramatic monologue just because you have a camera in your hand).
The cast is a mixed bag. DeJonge is pretty believable as the teenage daughter wanting to help her family come back together, and Oxenbould is fine as a bratty younger brother. Both of them, however, speak well beyond their years. It’s like Shyamalan has never heard average teenagers talk to each other. As for Dunagan, there was just something a little too “actorly” about her performance that I never bought as being real, but McRobbie pulled off the Pop Pop role perfectly. Even Hahn, who is usually seen in more comedic roles, does a nice job as the mom, even if most of her role consists mostly of Skype calls to the kids.
The film looks good, at least when the camera isn’t moving all over the place, and Shyamalan refrains from using cheap scare effects with loud music cues (and due to the nature of the film, there really is no musical score to rely on to build tension), allowing the visuals to sell the jumps, so that’s a good thing. But as far as storytelling goes, I’m still not sold that this is really Shyamalan’s “comeback.” It’s certainly better than his last three films, by a longshot, but it’s still a long way from coming close to his first three major films.
The Visit has a run time of 1 hour 34 minutes, and is rated PG-13 for disturbing thematic material including terror, violence and some nudity, and for brief language.
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