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.
