The Visit

M. Night Shyamalan has made it a habit of featuring twists in his films, so much so that audiences now expect them without question and focus more on what the potential twist might be rather than what’s actually going on in the film. Shyamalan’s rise to fame was so steep that it’s near impossible to recapture the brilliance that was his early work of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable. After a string of terrible films, The Visit can be seen as an improvement. While the film is far from his best, it’s great to finally see him headed back in the right direction.

Paula (Kathryn Hahn) hasn’t seen her parents since she left home after an incident. It’s now been 15 years and while they’re still not on good terms, she decides to allow her two kids, Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) to go and visit grandma and grandpa for the first time. Everything seems all happy and normal at first, but as the week goes on the grandparents’ behavior becomes more and more disturbing. Everyone else chalks it up to old age, but Rebecca and Tyler believe something stranger is going on.

The Visit is your standard found-footage horror film with an added Shyamalan twist. It relies almost entirely on jump scares, some of which land well and some of which don’t. I like that there is no overlay of “creepy” music that gets dead silent to indicate something is about to happen. Something just happens. Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie star as the grandparents, Doris and John, and do a good job at giving you that warm and loving sensation one minute and being completely creepy the next.

What doesn’t work is how over-the-top The Visit’s depiction of the elderly can be. They’re constantly seen as old, frail, disturbing, insane, etc. The biggest thing you should be afraid of is old people. It’s not aliens, or robots, or plants. Yes, I still regard The Happening as Shyamalan’s worst film. The film is extremely basic in its portrayal; old people are creepy, mental illness is creepy. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that or care to explain why. Basically they’re old, and you should be afraid.

And there were times where I was temporarily scared. That was quickly remedied by humor which is prevalent throughout the film, perhaps a little too much. There are time when The Visit doesn’t know when to be a horror or a comedy and ends up being neither. I did end up enjoying Ed Oxenbould’s performance, however. He’s exactly how you would expect any 13-year-old kid who want to be a rapper would act. He’s great at lightening the mood, but a freestyle rap over the end credits is overkill.

The Visit may be predictable, but it does have some decent scares and more surprisingly, a few good laughs. It doesn’t provide anything new to the horror or found footage genre and just recycles aspects we’ve already seen in other films. There was a time when M. Night Shyamalan was on the cutting edge of horror. While that time has long since passed, it’s good to see that he’s recovered slightly from the true horrors that have been his past few films.