The Visit
M. Night Shyamalan has had a rough decade or so. People will come to different conclusions as to when Shyamalan’s fall from grace started to happen, although I trace it back to the “twist” at the end of 2004’s “The Village.” While I understand why he went in the direction he did, it felt like an unnecessary direction to go given how compelling the first 3/4s of the film was. After that came “Lady in the Water”…and then “The Happening”…then “The Last Airbender.” By the time his 2013 adventure thriller “After Earth,” with Will Smith at the most dull he’s ever been, arrived in theatres, studios were doing what they could to hide his involvement in the film. That film’s failure seemed to signal the final nail in the coffin of Shyamalan’s career, which makes his name being all over the promotional material for his new found-footage film, “The Visit,” a bit surprising. That’s only the first surprise in store for this film.
The premise for “The Visit” is a simple one: two kids (Becca, played by Olivia DeJonge, and Tyler, played by Ed Oxenbould) go to visit their grandparent’s house for a week while their mother (Kathryn Hahn) goes on a cruise with her boyfriend. Their father left the family years ago, and it was their mother’s relationship with their father that led to her estrangement from her parents. Now, they’ve insisted on having a visit with their grandchildren, and Becca has decided to film it for a documentary. But almost right off the bat, there’s something that seems off about Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) that may hint at the real reasons their mother has been estranged from her parents.
I’ve been torn as to how to approach discussing this film with regards to spoilers. One of the things that makes “The Visit” M. Night Shyamalan’s most wholly satisfying film since probably “Unbreakable” (although I do love “Signs”) is that it actually hits some of the same buttons as his breakout film, “The Sixth Sense,” on a narrative level. Apart from the found-footage formula lifted from the “Paranormal Activities” of the world, the film has an underlying theme that is of a piece with “Sixth Sense,” and that is reconciling past pains and forgiving both ourselves and others for what we, or they, have done. Becca and Tyler’s mother has been coy about the reasons her split with her parents was so contentious, and doesn’t want to tell them, but thinks her parents may tell them, which she would be comfortable with. However, when Becca tries to interview Nana on camera about the topic, she gets disturbed and refuses to answer herself, although Becca does get her to open up about it through a clever misdirection, which makes the truth of the situation all the more heartbreaking when we discover it. All of it. This focus on family dynamics and forgiveness and getting past emotional pain was one of the big strengths of “Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Signs,” and something that has been missing from Shyamalan’s work in the past 13 years, so to see it return in this film is a pleasant return to form for the director in his writing.
As a director, Shyamalan pulls out the usual tricks that come not just from the found-footage genre (stationary cameras catching sudden “jump” moments, the camera operator tracking back to sudden scares, in-the-distance noises) while also returning the same slow-burn tension-and-release formula that aided him well during some of the scarier moments of “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs” and “The Village.” He uses music sparingly here (no omnipresent James Newton Howard to break the “found footage” illusion), but he uses humor well and organically, coming from the characters and story, just as the horror does, and the “twist” at the end of this film is rather unexpected, pleasantly so, in how it ties in to what the fundamental narrative theme he sets up with this family. I can see where some critics are coming from when they see this as just another rung down the ladder from Shyamalan, but I think this is a movie that will hold up surprisingly well on multiple viewings, and even deserves multiple viewings. That’s something we haven’t been able to saw about a Shyamalan film in quite some time. He still has to show me more to really regain my trust, but he definitely has my attention again.
