What happened to M. Night Shyamalan in 2005? That year seems to be the dividing line between his good movies and his
not-so-good movies. Shyamalan burst onto the international scene in 1999 with his masterpiece "The Sixth Sense". It's been all downhill from there. Even though "Unbreakable" (2000), "Signs" (2002) and "The Village" (2004) were critical and commercial successes, none of them reached the level of praise and recognition he had achieved with "The Sixth Sense". Shyamalan's post-2005 directorial efforts included the less profitable and much less appreciated "Lady in the Water" (2006), "The Happening" (2008), "The Last Airbender" (2010) and "After Earth" (2013). That brings us to the horror comedy "The Visit" (PG-13, 1:34), Shyamalan's next attempt to halt his long losing streak.
Rebecca and Tyler Jamison (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) are New York teenagers who have never met their maternal grandparents. Their single mother, Paula (Kathryn Hahn), left her childhood home at 19. She hasn't seen her parents since and won't say why. This makes the kids curious, especially Becca. Besides, Becca and Tyler need more family connections, since their father ran off with another woman. Paula arranges for her kids to spend a week getting to know their grandparents. She puts the two teens on a train to her small hometown in Pennsylvania and sets off on a cruise with her new boyfriend. The kids are happy to give their mom a chance to get away and Becca is hoping that this visit with Nana and Pop-pop (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) will lead to reconciliation between them and Paula which is why Becca records the visit on video. She wants to make a documentary out of this whole story. Becca uses her video camera for interviews and other important moments, while her brother helps out by capturing additional footage using the video function on an old SLR camera. The video clips they capture aren't quite what they expected. Nana and Pop-pop seem nice enough, but their behavior is rather strange. The kids write off all this to the fact that their grandparents are just old. The kids learn that Pop-pop is incontinent and Nana suffers from sundowning, a type of dementia which causes symptoms to increase in the evening and at night. ("Sundowning" was the film's original title.) Still, old or not, the grandparents' behaviors seem more creepy than quirky – and might even be dangerous.
This is not your typical M. Night Shyamalan supernatural thriller, but it does borrow elements from the genre – and Shyamalan's own earlier work. Much like a haunted house movie, there are plenty of disturbing sights and sounds to go around – and they get more disturbing as the movie progresses. Although Shyamalan doesn't put a twist in ALL of his movies, there is one in this film – and it's a doozy. Odd old people, seen through the eyes of two teenagers making a movie plays as a combination of comedic and creepy through most of this film, but when the twist is revealed and its repercussions play out on screen, the comedy falls away while the creepiness increases and it's joined by a healthy dose of horror. It's also at this point that seemingly incidental details and dialog earlier in the film no longer require a sixth sense to understand.
With this movie, Shyamalan halts the downward trend in the quality of his films, but doesn't quite reverse it. It was disappointing to see him resort to the found footage format. It seems like a cheap ploy to draw in audience members who are too young to remember when his better movies first came out. Although this film minimizes the camera shake and terrible angles that we usually see in the found footage format, he sacrifices authenticity when he allows video shot by two different types of cameras to look exactly the same – and have a level of quality that couldn't come from those kinds of consumer cameras. (If you're going to make a found footage film look almost like a regular film anyway, why use the technique?) Worst of all, this style of filmmaking diminishes what is actually a pretty good story.
"The Visit" would've been better off playing it straight. The "comedy" in this horror comedy isn't really funny. Laughing at the declining mental and physical capabilities of an elderly man and woman when the plot is basically a serious one feels wrong. The quirks that the script gives to the teens don't make them funny either and seem random. In fact, the kids are more annoying than anything else. Their intelligence and preciousness are too extreme to be taken seriously and their relationship as older sister and younger brother doesn't ring true. This attempted return to form for Shyamalan is best visited on video – if at all. "C+"
Rebecca and Tyler Jamison (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) are New York teenagers who have never met their maternal grandparents. Their single mother, Paula (Kathryn Hahn), left her childhood home at 19. She hasn't seen her parents since and won't say why. This makes the kids curious, especially Becca. Besides, Becca and Tyler need more family connections, since their father ran off with another woman. Paula arranges for her kids to spend a week getting to know their grandparents. She puts the two teens on a train to her small hometown in Pennsylvania and sets off on a cruise with her new boyfriend. The kids are happy to give their mom a chance to get away and Becca is hoping that this visit with Nana and Pop-pop (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) will lead to reconciliation between them and Paula which is why Becca records the visit on video. She wants to make a documentary out of this whole story. Becca uses her video camera for interviews and other important moments, while her brother helps out by capturing additional footage using the video function on an old SLR camera. The video clips they capture aren't quite what they expected. Nana and Pop-pop seem nice enough, but their behavior is rather strange. The kids write off all this to the fact that their grandparents are just old. The kids learn that Pop-pop is incontinent and Nana suffers from sundowning, a type of dementia which causes symptoms to increase in the evening and at night. ("Sundowning" was the film's original title.) Still, old or not, the grandparents' behaviors seem more creepy than quirky – and might even be dangerous.
This is not your typical M. Night Shyamalan supernatural thriller, but it does borrow elements from the genre – and Shyamalan's own earlier work. Much like a haunted house movie, there are plenty of disturbing sights and sounds to go around – and they get more disturbing as the movie progresses. Although Shyamalan doesn't put a twist in ALL of his movies, there is one in this film – and it's a doozy. Odd old people, seen through the eyes of two teenagers making a movie plays as a combination of comedic and creepy through most of this film, but when the twist is revealed and its repercussions play out on screen, the comedy falls away while the creepiness increases and it's joined by a healthy dose of horror. It's also at this point that seemingly incidental details and dialog earlier in the film no longer require a sixth sense to understand.
With this movie, Shyamalan halts the downward trend in the quality of his films, but doesn't quite reverse it. It was disappointing to see him resort to the found footage format. It seems like a cheap ploy to draw in audience members who are too young to remember when his better movies first came out. Although this film minimizes the camera shake and terrible angles that we usually see in the found footage format, he sacrifices authenticity when he allows video shot by two different types of cameras to look exactly the same – and have a level of quality that couldn't come from those kinds of consumer cameras. (If you're going to make a found footage film look almost like a regular film anyway, why use the technique?) Worst of all, this style of filmmaking diminishes what is actually a pretty good story.
"The Visit" would've been better off playing it straight. The "comedy" in this horror comedy isn't really funny. Laughing at the declining mental and physical capabilities of an elderly man and woman when the plot is basically a serious one feels wrong. The quirks that the script gives to the teens don't make them funny either and seem random. In fact, the kids are more annoying than anything else. Their intelligence and preciousness are too extreme to be taken seriously and their relationship as older sister and younger brother doesn't ring true. This attempted return to form for Shyamalan is best visited on video – if at all. "C+"