The Visit (2015)

I really don't think I have to go into how much M. Night Shyamalan has become a bad punchline in movie making.  He has fallen quite a bit since The Sixth Sense, most recently before this directing the Will and Jaden Smith vehicle After Earth, which bombed spectacularly.

That movie, to Shyamalan's credit, was more the fault of the Smiths, since he was only a hired hand this time around.  He took that money and decided to see if he could start all over again with The Visit.  Instead of blowing a ton of money (and potentially having the film taken away from him again), he decided to make his own visit into the realm of found footage.  It's usually a good move, since even if the movie turns out to be horrible, the profit margin is still going to be huge.

Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenboud) are sent to spend time with their grandparents, whom they have never met, while their mother (Kathryn Hahn) goes on a cruise with her new boyfriend.  Becca sees this as an opportunity to get some redemption for her mother, who has not seen her parents since she left them a number of years prior.  Seeing the grandchildren is a step toward healing.

The kids meet Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) at the train station and settle in for their week-long stay.  Problem is, they are out of range for most of their gadgets and, grandparents being grandparents, bedtime is at 9:30 pm.  Only it turns out that grandma has a habit of wandering in her sleep and doing strange things.  The grandfather informs the kids that she experiences what is called "sundowning," where because of her dementia she happens to act up at night. 

Becca tries to connect with her grandparents through her film making, only to find them strangely distant when it comes to talking about what happened with their mother.  Also, townspeople are starting to ask questions about why they haven't been around to do the counseling they normally do.  As the week goes on, things get even more frightening for the kids, and they start to realize that they may truly be in danger.

The movie itself is not bad for found footage.  Not a lot of jerky camera, although they do stretch out the reason for someone to always have a camera on them, which is always a problem with the genre.  Despite it supposedly being an amateur film, many of M. Night Shyamalan's signatures are here.  He has always been a good director.  The problem in the past has been his writing, since he really has to reach sometimes for that twist ending. 

Yes, this one has a twist ending as well. You will probably guess it shortly into the movie, but I still won't give it away.  I will say that the advertising for this movie did it no favors, as it makes it seem like the grandparents are Hansel and Gretel style witches.  They're not.  This is not a supernatural horror film, but rather a suspense movie. 

All four main players do well, although the kid rapping was annoying.  The good news is this is not as bad as some of Shyamalan's more recent movies, but it really offers no surprises (despite its attempts), nor does it really do anything new with the genre.  It's really just Shyamalan pushing the reset button.

The Visit (2015)
Time: 94 minutes
Starring: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenboud, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie
Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Lawnmower Man (1992)

Image
Virtual reality has been one of the most hyped, and one of the most disappointing, promises of technology.  While it promotes immersion into a cybernetic world what it really provides are video games with 20-year-old graphics and the occasional bruise when one accidentally hits a closet door.  In the case of The Lawnmower Man  what it is promising is that something with graphics just a little bit better than Dire Straits's "Money for Nothing" video will somehow change the world and alter humanity. It was laughable then and it is laughable now.  The only person not laughing was Stephen King, who demanded that his name be removed from all future advertising for the movie because he never wrote this.  The story, of which a short film was made in the 1980s, involves a man unwittingly hiring a Greek god to mow his lawn and, after said god creates a spectacle, paying for the landscaping with his life.  It's only a few pages and, in my opinion, it is one of King's...
Read more

Things (1989)

Image
Most of the time when I hear a movie is the worst ever I know that is hyperbole. There are few candidates and I would even say the famous book chronicling the worst movies ever made got it wrong.  Plan 9 from Outer Space is laughably incompetent, but enjoyable.  The worst kind of films are the ones where no joy can be found in the watching experience, for reasons ranging from unlikeable characters to just sheer boredom.  A truly horrible movie is something like  Things.   This is a 1989 direct-to-video horror film from Canada, filmed on 8mm and dubbed once it was completed and the makers realized most of the sound was unusable.  Director Andrew Jordan and writer Barry J. Gillis managed to grab porn star Amber Lynn for an hour to shoot her as a news reporter just so they could put her face on the video box.  Most of the music was done by Gillis, and some of it by a local band called Familiar Strangers.  It was filmed in large part in Andrew Norman'...
Read more

The Omen (1976)

Image
A movie does not have to be high art to strike a chord with the public.  The Omen was an attempt by writer David Seltzer to make some money and get a nice trip to the UK.  It just so happened that because of The Exorcist the public was hungry for more movies involving demons and such, and adding a veneer of Catholicism didn't hurt either.  The Vatican's secrets are most likely of more interest to scholars than anyone else, but a religion doesn't hang on over the centuries without creating a bit of mystery.  In this case, Seltzer settled on the Revelation of St. John, the low-fantasy portion of the Bible and, instead of an hilariously named (albeit historically correct) demon named Pazuzu, with The Omen we get the son of Satan himself.  When Robert Thorne (Gregory Peck) is informed that his child has died he visits a priest at the hospital in Rome where his wife is coalescing.  He is given an offer too good to be true: a foundling, whose mother died in...
Read more