The Visit
Starring Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Embattled director M. Night Shyamalan returns to his horror roots in The Visit and, of course, there’s a twist. Employing the overused found footage format, the filmmaker manages to inject some quirky laughs into what is otherwise a forgettable flick. The film fares better than his last three outings but that doesn’t say much when the list includes critical and commercial duds After Earth, The Last Airbender, and The Happening.
The Visitchronicles a brother and sister’s week-long stay with grandparents they have never met. Young Becca (DeJonge) is a budding documentarian and decides to record their experience on video. Her brother Tyler (Oxenbould) provides plenty of comic relief and adds some much needed levity to an otherwise dark story. The kids begin to notice plenty of odd behavior courtesy of Pop Pop and Nana (played effectively by Peter McRobbie and Deanna Dunagan); he piles up used diapers in a woodshed by day, she claws at the walls naked during the night.
The most striking thing about The Visit is the script, which mines for intentional laughs, thus making for a rather bizarre kind of movie stuck somewhere in genre limbo. The thriller is admirable to a point until the frenzied, nauseating shaky cam grows visually tiresome. An inevitable twist revelation and clunky final scene that basically heavy-handedly hammers the message home only make matters worse.
One has to give Shyamalan credit for thinking outside the box; the disappointing irony is that his own gamble ends up feeling ultimately derivative.
