Movie Review
The Visit
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
By Noel Vera
The Visit is easily M. Night Shyamalan’s best recent feature (Anyone out there willing to speak up for The Last Airbender? Which I prefer over James Cameron’s latest, but that’s more a measure of how much I dislike Cameron’s work than of how much I like Shyamalan’s). A question still hangs over the movie though: is it any good?
Actually and surprisingly: yes. Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent by their mother Paula (Kathryn Hahn) to her estranged parents for a week-long stay; Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) meet the kids at the train station and express undisguised delight — Paula hasn’t talked to her parents ever since she eloped with her high school teacher, 15 years ago (they’ve separated since). Becca sees this as a hopeful sign, the start to a long gradual process to bring the family together. Along the way Becca plans to make a documentary about their experiences (she’s an aspiring 15-year-old filmmaker already mouthing pretentious terms like “visual tension”), allowing her mom a little quality vacation time with her new boyfriend, the latest in a string of unhappy relationships.
That’s the setup; the execution couldn’t be simpler: Shyamalan avoids any mention of aliens or apocalyptic forces, ghosts or supernatural creatures. This is strictly a domestic drama, about two kids gingerly exploring the unknown emotional ground between them and their long-unseen grandparents, and there’s apparently a lot of ground to explore, perhaps even explain: Nana and Pop Pop have a number of eccentric rules (curfew is at an unbelievable 9:30 p.m., the old woodshed out back is off-limits and so is the basement down below), they’re fond of spoiling their grandkids with homemade treats (scrumptious-looking cookies stuffed with toasted walnuts, among others), and display odd if not bizarre behavior at night (wall-scratching, naked wanderings, the occasional projectile vomiting).
It’s creepy fun, with older members of the audience no doubt enjoying the proxy vengeance inflicted by their onscreen equivalents on the grandchildren — payback for all the years of rap, low-waist pants, the occasionally cruel contemptuous gesture. Younger viewers might appreciate confirmation of their worst fears: that old age leads to degeneration and dementia, maybe even worse things.
The filmmaker whose equipment is used to record the unfolding story — this is a “found footage” picture after all, though better shot and lit than is common for the genre — is 15, so the movie ultimately finds itself sympathetic to her point of view. Which isn’t as judgmental as you might imagine — Becca finds her Nana and Pop Pop strange and even frightening, but this only adds an edge to her hopes that they are when all is said and done decent folk, open to reconciliation, possible to love.
That I suspect is what makes a good or at least memorable Shyamalan movie — not deployment of a particularly ingenious plot twist, but stoutness and strength of the emotional thread running through the narrative: the love of a single mother for her strange son (and vice versa); the love of a son for his strange father (and vice versa); the grief of a husband for his dead wife; the (in this picture) desire of a grandchild for a reconciled family.
(Spoilers ahead. — Ed.)
Which may be why (skip the rest of this paragraph if you want to see the movie!) when the surprise twist is actually revealed the picture loses me. So Nana and Pop Pop aren’t who they seem to be — so what? They’ve come to know the grandkids, who have come to know them; more to the point we’ve come to know them, however little, however briefly, and to assume we’d so easily toss our sympathies out the window is presumptuous of Shyamalan, or at least wasteful. Crazy people or mentally disturbed folk despite popular misunderstanding don’t do things without a reason — they often do have a reason, a good compelling coherent one at least to their point of view (the trick is to find out just what that view is, exactly). Up to this point Shyamalan has managed to tread a thin line between viewing the old pair with reluctantly growing affection and with persistent unease; when matters clarify it’s suddenly kill or be killed — there’s little to no ambiguity between adults and kids at this point, and you miss the knotty, emotional texture.
The movie recovers somewhat at the very end, when Shyamalan picks up the thread of family feeling he briefly dropped. Not as good as his very best (the eerily demented Unbreakable) but better than some of his better known work (the overrated Sixth Sense, the ridiculous Signs). Yes I think this is a return for the director, a brief resuscitation of the moribund found-footage form, and — arguably, arguably — the best American horror pic to come out recently. Which isn’t saying a lot, but — hey — is saying something.
MTRCB Rating: R-13
