In some ways, the uniting of M. Night Shyamalan and microbudget horror production company Blumhouse for The Visit couldn’t be more perfect, and not just because audiences groan at the sight of their names during previews. Both camps are fully capable of greatness—Shyamalan’s first two and a half films and Blumhouse’s Insidious, Creep and even the first Paranormal Activity—and both are apparently desirous of some public validation of their contributions.
Enter The Visit to solve everyone’s problems, a movie marketable as a teen-centric, found-footage horror movie with the framing device of being a fully produced documentary by an ostentatious 15-year-old budding filmmaker, thereby allowing Shyamalan his stylistic flourishes and occasional dash of pretension.
It’s a contrivance that occasionally pays off; the movie is mostly breezy, occasionally scary and just focused enough to keep you from remembering that these are the people responsible for The Happening and The Gallows. The story goes that teen intellectual and film theory buff Rebecca and her younger brother, 13-year-old rapping wannabe Casanova Tyler (yes, really), visit their grandparents for a week while documenting their trip. The two generations have never met before, due to the kids’ mother’s estrangement from her parents following an unspecified event. Initially, the grandparents appear sweet, if eccentric, but as their behavior becomes increasingly strange and often frightening, Rebecca and Tyler begin to fear for their safety as they attempt to survive the visit with their sanity intact.
While the best qualities of both Shyamalan and Blumhouse are on full display, so are the worst. Most of the action is better shot than your average shaky-cam flick, but the jump scares operate by exactly the same logic of pause, quiet, boom. There is nothing that carries the already tired genre forward, save for Rebecca’s overexplanation of film theory and narrative structure along the way. Shyamalan puts words in the mouth of his 15-year-old protagonist that no adolescent would ever say, no matter how precocious or pretentious. The effect is that it feels less like dialogue from a character and more like Shyamalan flexing his cinematic intellect in an attempt to show that he’s not just a monger of gimmicks. Tyler openly scorns the idea that movies need structure, while Rebecca never misses an opportunity to show off how much Shyamalan knows about film theory.
I’ll preface this next point with a light spoiler warning, even though this is a review of an M. Night Shyamalan movie: There is a twist that is far creepier than anything I predicted, and for about 15 minutes following its revelation the movie soars. The scary parts are scarier, the funny parts are funnier, the performances are sharper, and the story gallops forward, never dragging for a second. Some people will leave the theater feeling they have had a satisfying cinematic experience, but, honestly, that leaves 80 minutes of a mixed bag of obvious foreshadowing, go-nowhere exposition and redundant scare tactics.
While we’re on the subject, a note on twists: The common belief about Shyamalan is that he writes the ending of his movies first and throws everything else together. While he does lean far too heavily on plot developments that come far too late, that’s not altogether fair to him as a storyteller. The facts of his twists are indeed surprises, but when they work it’s because the main emotional ideas behind them were firmly established along the way. The revelation about Bruce Willis’ character in The Sixth Sense doesn’t alter the emotional journey, and the movie still holds up even when spoiled. The same is true of Unbreakable and partially of Signs, but certainly not of The Village, which put far too much weight on its twist and not on its characters.
If The Visit proves anything positive, it’s that there is still some vitality to both Shyamalan and the found-footage genre. But, even at the top of their game, they appear to be completely out of new ideas as they repackage old ones.
Playing this week
Ant-Man
The Gift
Inside Out
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.
Minions
Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation
Mistress America
No Escape
The Perfect Guy
Shaun the Sheep Movie
Straight Outta Compton
The Transporter: Refueled
A Walk in the Woods
War Room
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
244-3213
