The Visit

M. Night Shyamalan – 2015 – USA 

Two annoying brats from a broken home are sent by their mother to visit her estranged parents for the first time.  The grandparents live in a remote farm house in the country somewhere and as soon as the kids arrive, they start to notice increasingly weird behavior on the part of their elderly hosts.  I hate to leap aboard the decade-old Shyamalan-backlash bandwagon, but I’ll force myself to do it just this once.  What in the world?  Rarely has so much good will been squandered so spectacularly.  At the very moment when Shyamalan should be taking stock of his career and trying to do something genuine or original, he instead produces a lightweight, wise-cracking found-footage thriller that could have been made by anyone.  Only his hallmark twist-ending remains to remind us that this is the guy who made The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000), and even that is a mistake.  When will he and others of his ilk finally learn something from Hitchcock, whom they claim to admire so much?  Instead of being blown away by the “revelation” near the end of the film, I instantly knew that the information provided would have been infinitely more effective at the beginning of the film.  The source of the story’s suspense should have revolved around whether or not the kids would realize what was going on before it’s too late.  That’s what Hitchcock would have done.  That someone of Shyamalan’s A-list clout would make yet another found-footage movie where characters are miraculously adept at keeping cameras pointed in the right direction while fleeing for their lives – on their hands and knees no less! – is really despicable and embarrassing.  Whatever modicum of eeriness the film manages to scrape together every once in a while is completely ruined by Shyamalan’s ineptness with the worst clichés of his chosen genre.  The concept has promise, which makes the result even more unfortunate.  It brings up some touchy and troubling ideas that are rarely dealt with in movies; the thin line between eccentricity and dementia in the elderly, the dread of the aged on the part of the young, the resentment of youth on the part of the old.  It also indecisively toys with the heritage of fairy tales, particularly Hansel and Gretel, as well as the old suspense movie trope of escaped mental patients.  The ideas are interesting, but they’re not enough when ultimately all we have on our hands is a very cheap-looking and cheap-feeling exercise in a long over-used and discredited genre.  I don’t know anyone who enjoys found-footage movies as such; we only tolerate the style if it’s used in a well-made movie like The Blair Witch Project (1999), and… well, it’s extremely hard to think of any other examples.