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I just got back from seeing M Night Shyamalan's The Visit. Full disclosure, I'm not an M Night hater. I felt that The Last Airbender was execrable and After Earth had some serious flaws; but for the most part I'm generally happy with the man's output. Since Shyamalan used his fee from AE to make this movie himself, I went in with high expectations... and happily, they weren't let down.
The Visit is a weird sort of film, as you might expect given the writer/director's proclivities. It tries to straddle the line between being a comedy and a horror and -- with a few exceptions -- mostly manages to be both at the same time. It's a found-footage film with all of the quirks and foibles that go along with that particular horror sub-genre... if you hate found footage, there won't be anything in this film to change your mind. If like me you're a big fan of the sub-genre, there's a lot to enjoy here.
The movie is about two children with a sad backstory: they were abandoned by their father, leaving them in the care of their mother, who'd given up a lot to be with the man whom she'd thought was her soulmate. The children want to meet their grandparents, whom they've never before met, and jump at the chance to do so when said grandparents reach out to their mother and ask for the chance to connect with the pair. The children also have an ulterior motive for the trip: to give their mother and her new beau a chance to spend some time together; and also to see if they can help reconcile their mom with her parents all these years after she'd left them to be with her tarnished knight.
As you'd expect from an M Night movie, the characters are all more complicated than a single screenplay can do justice. It's not entirely clear how cohesively these complications would connect to create a full character in some other medium like a novel; but in the world of cinema (which Shyamalan, echoing The Lady In The Water, deconstructs as an important narrative arc of this movie) these complications serve to make the children, their mother and her parents into very interesting and at times unpredictable individuals. Everyone is flawed in this movie and those flaws really help to drive the plot towards its climax. Utilizing his skill at twists, Shyamalan sets you up for one sort of horror movie during the first three quarters of the film and then reveals that all this time he's been setting up quite another one. It would be easy to feel cheated by this kind of subversion; but in my opinion, Shyamalan manages to pull this off with the same grace as he did in his earlier movies.
Unfortunately a director as subversive as Shyamalan has a tendency to introduce some flaws into his movies; flaws that could be avoided by, paradoxically, making the characters more cliched and less interesting. One of the children's fatal character flaws (freezing under duress) is introduced only a few minutes before its invoked by the screenplay; as a result, the audience doesn't get a chance to integrate this tendency towards paralysis into their concept of his character and thus it feels like it comes out of the blue, rather than being part of a fully realized character. The other child has a tendency to Shyamalan-Speech (ie, using words that no other person on Earth would use in a given situation); when used sparingly, this provides a lot of colour for the character. When used with less restraint than was needed here, this just makes the character's words feel a little artificial at times.
But flaws aside, I enjoyed the heck out of The Visit. It was a really disturbing film that relied mostly on the banality of horror to provide most of its creeps. It kept me guessing and really when I go to a horror movie, that's what I want most: suspense and uncertainty.
The Visit is a weird sort of film, as you might expect given the writer/director's proclivities. It tries to straddle the line between being a comedy and a horror and -- with a few exceptions -- mostly manages to be both at the same time. It's a found-footage film with all of the quirks and foibles that go along with that particular horror sub-genre... if you hate found footage, there won't be anything in this film to change your mind. If like me you're a big fan of the sub-genre, there's a lot to enjoy here.
The movie is about two children with a sad backstory: they were abandoned by their father, leaving them in the care of their mother, who'd given up a lot to be with the man whom she'd thought was her soulmate. The children want to meet their grandparents, whom they've never before met, and jump at the chance to do so when said grandparents reach out to their mother and ask for the chance to connect with the pair. The children also have an ulterior motive for the trip: to give their mother and her new beau a chance to spend some time together; and also to see if they can help reconcile their mom with her parents all these years after she'd left them to be with her tarnished knight.
As you'd expect from an M Night movie, the characters are all more complicated than a single screenplay can do justice. It's not entirely clear how cohesively these complications would connect to create a full character in some other medium like a novel; but in the world of cinema (which Shyamalan, echoing The Lady In The Water, deconstructs as an important narrative arc of this movie) these complications serve to make the children, their mother and her parents into very interesting and at times unpredictable individuals. Everyone is flawed in this movie and those flaws really help to drive the plot towards its climax. Utilizing his skill at twists, Shyamalan sets you up for one sort of horror movie during the first three quarters of the film and then reveals that all this time he's been setting up quite another one. It would be easy to feel cheated by this kind of subversion; but in my opinion, Shyamalan manages to pull this off with the same grace as he did in his earlier movies.
Unfortunately a director as subversive as Shyamalan has a tendency to introduce some flaws into his movies; flaws that could be avoided by, paradoxically, making the characters more cliched and less interesting. One of the children's fatal character flaws (freezing under duress) is introduced only a few minutes before its invoked by the screenplay; as a result, the audience doesn't get a chance to integrate this tendency towards paralysis into their concept of his character and thus it feels like it comes out of the blue, rather than being part of a fully realized character. The other child has a tendency to Shyamalan-Speech (ie, using words that no other person on Earth would use in a given situation); when used sparingly, this provides a lot of colour for the character. When used with less restraint than was needed here, this just makes the character's words feel a little artificial at times.
But flaws aside, I enjoyed the heck out of The Visit. It was a really disturbing film that relied mostly on the banality of horror to provide most of its creeps. It kept me guessing and really when I go to a horror movie, that's what I want most: suspense and uncertainty.
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