The Visit, the new film written and directed by M. Night Shyama-lan, confirms that this once-moderately surprising filmmaker can no longer surprise anybody, let alone helm a horror tale that should have a decent number of scares and yet is bound to bore you to death. In fact, I believe that the ingenious Sixth Sense is arguably the only really good film he’s ever made — perhaps Signs and The Village are decent enough in their own terms, but alongside Sixth Sense these were made in his early career in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And that was a long, long time ago.
The plot goes pretty much like this: two siblings, a young brother (Ed Oxenbould) and a teen sister (Olivia DeJonge) are sent to spend some days with their grandparents, whom they never met since their mother had an awful fight with them when she was 19, and so left her home. Then out of the blue, her parents (who found out where she lives because they looked her up online), ask their daughter to allow them to see their grandchildren. Why she would agree to their request still eludes me. Nonetheless, off they go. In the meantime, she takes a vacation.
Upon arrival, the kids and the grandparents act as though they knew each other. No signs of uneasiness are ever exposed. You figure it out. Soon enough, the old-timers begin to show some very, very strange behaviour — you know, granny wakes up at night and walks around naked, while grandpa dresses up for a party that doesn’t even exist and also leaves his dirty diapers hidden in the house. Of course, it’s all attributed to different illnesses they both suffer. And to their old age.
As some elements make clear — an isolated house, surrounded by sombre woods, the old woman asking her granddaughter to get inside the oven to clean it, the dark side the grandparents eventually exhibit — this film is meant to be a reworking of Hansel and Gretel. And since the kids want to document their visit, guess what? They film the visit on a camcorder, ever since they left home. So once again you have an entire movie shot in first person singular and accordingly seen from the camera’s lens.
Not only does The Visit have quite a few absurd moments of near total lack of plausibility, but it’s also extremely annoying from a cinematic point of view. For instance, the fact that the characters film the visit is absolutely unnecessary for the plot. It would’ve been exactly the same film had it been shot in a conventional manner. Perhaps Shyamalan thought the gimmick would add some interest, but so many horror films are made this way that by now it just doesn’t work — unless it’s recreated in a yet unseen fashion and for a good purpose, which is surely not the case here.
The characters themselves are far from interesting as there’s basically nothing that individualizes them. So how could you relate to them? Likewise, how can you get hooked on a horror film with basically no scares at all? Sure, there’s a feeble streak of tension and nervousness here and there because something supposedly malignant seems to be lurking around the corner. But as the largely uneventful plot unfolds, you keep waiting for the terror to come. At the same time, you know you are waiting in vain. By the time a “big secret” is unveiled, what little mystery was there vanishes for good. The revelation is so moronic that you now know you’ve been cheated for good.
Production notes
The Visit (US, 2015). Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. With: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn. Cinematography: Maryse Alberti. Editing: Luke Ciarrocchi. Running time: 94 minutes.
