The Visit

Dir: M. Night Shyamalan

2015

*

The Last Airbender and The Happening weren’t great films, After Earth wasn’t as bad as everyone proclaimed it was, I have a soft spot for Signs and The Lady in the Water and The Village is a good film dammit. However, it is hard to tell that 2015’s The Visit was directed by the same man who brought us The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. He made the brilliant Split just one year later. I honestly don’t understand how you can go from absolute garbage to great film in just under a year? Scrap that though, I don’t know how a director like M. Night Shyamalan can make a film like The Visit at this point in his career and think it is acceptable? Shyamalan has since said that he used his fee from 2013’s After Earth to self-produce this film in an attempt to regain artistic control after his recent movies had been denied final cut, and were even taken away from him in post-production. I’m beginning to see why. It’s a terribly conceived film in the ‘found-footage’ horror sub-genre that forgets all of the simple rules associated with it. The ‘found-footage’ is far too glossy and the narrative is painfully aware of itself. The story follows brother and sister; 15-year-old Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and 13-year-old Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) as they prepare for a five-day visit with their estranged grandparents while their divorced mother Loretta goes on a cruise with her boyfriend. Loretta reveals that she has not spoken to her parents in 15 years after marrying her high school teacher, of whom her parents disapproved. Having never met their grandparents, the teenagers intend to record a documentary film about their visit using a camcorder. Becca and Tyler meet their grandparents, referred to as "Nana" and "Pop Pop," at a train station. When they arrive at their isolated farmhouse, Becca and Tyler are instructed to never go into the basement because it contains mold, and that bedtime is at 9:30 every evening, after which they shouldn't leave their room. The first night, an hour past curfew, Becca ventures downstairs for something to eat and sees Nana projectile vomiting all over the house, which frightens her. She tells Pop Pop, who dismisses it as Nana having the stomach flu. He then reminds her not to leave their bedroom after 9:30 pm. The ‘fear of old people’ narrative is quite odious and it gets progressively worse. Over the next few days, Becca and Tyler notice their grandparents exhibiting more strange and disturbing behavior. Tyler walks into Pop Pop's shed and finds a huge pile of soiled adult diapers. Becca asks Nana about the day Loretta left home, and Nana begins to shake and scream. Later, Pop Pop and Nana are confronted by a woman they helped in counseling, and she goes into the backyard with them but is never seen leaving. Concerned about the events, Tyler decides to secretly film what happens downstairs at night, but Nana discovers the hidden camera, retrieves a large knife, and tries unsuccessfully to break into the children's locked bedroom. When Becca and Tyler view the camera footage of Nana with the knife, they contact Loretta and beg her to come get them. They show her images of her parents, and she panics and says they are not her parents. Realizing that they have been with strangers all week, the teenagers try to leave the house, but Nana and Pop Pop trap them inside and force them to play board games. Later, Becca sneaks into the basement and finds the corpses of her real grandparents, along with uniforms from the mental hospital at which they worked, revealing the impostors as escaped patients. Pop Pop grabs Becca and imprisons her in his bedroom with Nana, who tries to eat her. He then starts to torment Tyler psychologically by smearing his face with his dirty diaper. Becca fatally stabs Nana with a glass shard from a broken mirror, then runs into the kitchen and attacks Pop Pop. As Pop Pop starts to gain the upper hand, Tyler knocks him to the floor and kills him by repeatedly slamming the refrigerator door onto his head. The teens escape outside unharmed, where they are met by their mother and police officers. In the aftermath, Becca asks Loretta about what happened the day she left home. Loretta states that she had a major argument with her parents, during which she hit her mother and was then struck by her father. Loretta then left home and ignored their attempts to contact her. Loretta concludes that reconciliation was always possible had she wanted it. She then tells Becca not to hold on to anger over her mother and father's abandonment. The end credits scene then sees Tyler rap for the camera. The film doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be and tries its hand at horror, comedy and clever documentary techniques. It’s seriously painful to watch. The comedy elements of the film are far more shocking and horrifying than any of the horror, and the horror is a lazy mix of Ring, Paranormal Activity and every other cheap b-movie horror going. The jump scenes are predictable and they won’t make you jump. I think making the elderly and mentally ill the villains is pretty nasty, indeed, the the whole film is fairly tasteless. The whimsical musings on documentary film making are also fairly nauseating. Shyamalan has admitted in interviews that he had trouble keeping the tone for the film consistent during the editing phase, saying that the first cut of the film resembled an art house film more than a horror film. A second cut went in the opposite direction and the film became a comedy. He eventually struck a middle balance and cut the film as a thriller, which, according to him, helped tie the different elements together as they "could stay in service of the movie". Utter crap. You can’t polish a turd and the idea was a turd from the very beginning. He’s made mistakes before but after nine or so films and twenty odd years under his belt you’d think he would have realised. But then he made two good films within four years of it, so I don’t have a clue what The Visit was all about really, all I know is that it is awful in every single way a film can be.