Don’t call it a comeback! Well okay I guess you can call The Visit M. Night Shyamalan’s comeback. For the past twelve years Shyamalan has had a rough time trying to direct good movies. You could easily make the argument that he hasn’t put out a decent movie since Signs (2002) depending on how you feel about that movie which sometimes gets polarizing opinions. Now Shyamalan has teamed up with low budget horror movie king Jason Blum and his Blumhouse Productions to bring us The Visit. Is Shyamalan’s first written and directed movie in five years going to get him back on track? I think there is a good possibility that this comeback will be a success because I mostly enjoyed this movie.
The Visit is about two siblings, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), who go to visit their grandparents Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) for a week. Their mom (Kathryn Hahn) has a strained relationship with their grandparents having not seen them for fifteen years. Becca is a filmmaker and decides to document the visit so that she can make a movie out of it. At first everything seems to be fine and they get along great with their grandparents but after the first night they start to realize that Nana and Pop Pop are acting very weird.
I went into this movie thinking that it has a pretty decent and original premise. M. Night Shyamalan may get in a bit over his head when it comes to some movies, but there is no denying that he has a creative mind and is an interesting director from a technical visual standpoint. I’m not sure if he had to make this movie which only cost five million dollars because the big studios won’t let him make another big budget or if there is another reason. All his movies have made money except for what might be considered his biggest box office failure, Lady in the Water (2006), which received some of the worst word of mouth criticism in recent memory. With this movie I think Shyamalan is honestly just trying to get back to his thriller roots and doing it as tightly as he can.
One sign of Shyamalan getting back to his roots is having two teens star in this movie. His early movies featured kids in them, but they were almost always around ten years old. The two teens in this movie are a bit older and come off as pretty likable and funny. The interesting thing about The Visit is that it is almost as much a comedy as it is a horror movie. Shyamalan has shown offbeat humor in other movies he has made most notably Signs (2002) but I wouldn’t exactly say it is a trademark of his unless The Happening (2008) was suppose to be intentionally funny instead of unintentionally funny like it was. The two teens in this movie reminded me a lot of the two teen characters from another Blumhouse Productions found footage horror movie Paranormal Activity 4. I know that movie wasn’t received very well by most critics, but I thought the two teens gave really good natural and funny performances and I think the two actors in The Visit were also able to tap into the same type of chemistry together.
Due to this movie being a found footage movie I have to say that this isn’t Shyamalan’s best looking movie from a technical point of view. That isn’t to say that there isn’t interesting shots, but I think the filmmakers wanted to keep this movie cheap and found footage is just the best way to do that. From a story standpoint the found footage aspect actually works. Usually in these found footage movies that is where they fail due to characters running with cameras during intense moments when the average person would have just dropped the camera. This movie may suffer a bit from that near the end, but overall I think this movie generally passes the found footage flaw test.
This is by no means Shyamalan’s best movie, but I do think he is taking steps in a better direction now. With this being an M. Night Shyamalan movie I don’t think it is a spoiler in saying that there is a pretty big twist. I don’t think everyone will figure it out before it is revealed although I figured it out pretty early in the movie. Even though I figured it out I actually enjoyed the twist and thought it worked pretty well. People usually think all Shyamalan has are gimmicky twists, but I believe he is a much better storyteller than that. His movies tend to have fleshed out characters that we can connect to on an emotional level. The biggest success of The Visit is that he is able to do that here by showing very interesting character developments with the two lead characters. Most found footage movies don’t have that kind of depth and I think Shyamalan was able to make you care about the two teen characters in this in a way that a lot of writers wouldn’t be able to.
Dave’s Rating- ★★★★(4) out of ★★★★★(5)
