The Visit (2015)

The Visit was considered something of a return to form for director and writer M. Night Shyamalan, who had struck out just previously with After Earth in 2013 and The Last Airbender in 2010 (I had given up on him before that so I don’t know either except by their terrible reputations). It’s fair enough to give him the accolades—The Visit is a nifty horror picture which includes the rare feat of a jump-scare that continued to scare me even after I jumped. Usually I’m just annoyed by jump-scares. The story involves two siblings—Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould)—who are sent to stay with their grandparents while their mother (Kathryn Hahn) goes on a cruise with her latest boyfriend. Becca is the older of the two. Both are in their teens and still in school. They have never met these grandparents. Their mother had a terrible fight with them when she was 19 and ran away and has never spoken to them again since. Details of that story elude us all the way to the end. Their mother won’t tell them what happened, says they’ll have to ask her folks if they want to know. The grandparents—Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie)—seem to be typical grandparents at first, in spite of the awkwardness of meeting for the first time. They listen to Tyler rap extemporaneously on the subject of their choice, pineapple upside-down cake. Rapping is his ambition. Tyler says his sound is like Tyler, the Creator, but of course Nana and Pop Pop have never heard of him. Becca, meanwhile, is an aspiring filmmaker, talks a lot about visual tension and mise en scene and such, and shoots a lot of this movie. Wikipedia describes The Visit as a found-footage movie, but it isn’t really, only has some elements of that. Pretty soon strange things begin to happen after 9:30 at night, the household bedtime. Becca and Tyler hear weird noises outside their bedroom at night. When they open the door what they see is almost traumatizing—for us, let alone them. Nana apparently has sundowner’s syndrome, which is dementia that grows much worse with nightfall (hence the 9:30 bedtime). Pop Pop, for his part, is doing something in the shed on their property which he keeps hidden from the others. And so it goes, as the kids investigate and the reality becomes more disturbing. There is a plot twist, of course, which in this case is the explanation for what’s going on. While it is not particularly original, it upends everything we have believed about the movie’s reality to that point. It’s convenient but not really cheap, as so many of Shyamalan’s plot twists can be. The result is a pretty good picture overall. Shyamalan makes his share of dogs, no question, but he can turn out some pretty good ones too.