The Visit review

M. Knight Shyamalan is a name that’s hard to live-down for a lot movie-goers these days. After reviving the supernatural-thriller in 1999 with his Oscar-nominated film “The Sixth Sense” and solidifying his brand with a few notable follow-ups, his career hit an irrevocable downward slide, and over the last decade he’s been bumbling into mistake after another.  Films like “Lady in the Water” and “The Happening” revealed a tendency towards half-baked concepts, overwritten screenplays, and lack of directorial sense of self-awareness that’s burdened the bulk of his later work. Even taking-on for-hire projects like the “The Last Airbender,” adapted from the popular Nickelodeon cartoon, as well as the awkward Will and Jayden Smith vehicle “After Earth,” couldn’t refocus the floundering filmmaker, despite relying less on his own ideas.

 Shyamalan has now teamed with the successful horror production factory Blumehouse (“Paranormal Activity,” “Insidious,” “Sinister,” etc...) to get back to nuts and bolts of suspense directing. With this ninety minute, found-footage B-movie, he has no sights set on prestige or deliberately paced auteur ambitions, but even with nothing to prove and his toolbox taken away from him, his ego and writerly obsessions get in the way of this uneven and problematic popcorn thriller.

Olivia Dolange and Ed Oxenbould play Becca and Tyler, two suburban tweens who have been sent on a week-long trip to visit their distant grandparents for the first time. Their single mother (Kathryn Hahn) is up-front about the tense relationship she has with her parents, with whom she hasn’t spoken with in many years, but is rather cagey about the specifics of their estrangement. To uncovering the mystery about what happened the night her mother left her parent’s house, Becca has decided to film this trip as a documentary about reconciliation. Her younger brother Tyler, a wannabee hip-hop lyricist, is more interested in figuring out why their newly acquainted grandparents are acting so strange; Nana (Deanna Dunagan) wandering the halls nude in the middle of night, scratching at the walls like an animal, and pop pop (Peter McRobbie) taking many private trips to a locked shed in the back yard of their country property.

Conceptually “The Visit” is promising enough, tapping into the societal strain of generation gaps, the paranoia of isolation from familiarity, and the universal fear of growing old and losing your physical and mental capabilities. All the ingredients are present for a Hitchcockian Hansel and Gretel tale, but Shyamalan peppers the entire experience with derailing creative choices. In framing the narrative as a found-footage video project, the film is allowed to move quickly with a sudden cuts and time-hops, which admittedly streamlines M. Knight’s penchant for dimly-lit, slow-burning ponderousness, but it also constipates the picture’s aesthetics, deadening much of the suspense in justifying and limiting camera placement and shot set-ups.

 This conceit also feeds into the director’s weakness in defaulting to expository dialogue whenever he needs to reveal more about the characters or the world he’s building. After all, if we are viewing a diegetic documentary in the works, then characters are in the position to say what they are feeling and thinking and are given the opportunity to explain any other necessary back-story directly to the camera. As a result, the story is largely told instead of shown, which is bummer because most of the performances are either misdirected, hammy, or flat-out bad. Dolange has a spark of sincerity underneath her achingly affected cineaste dialogue about framing and mis-en-scene but Oxenbould’s bright-eyed audition-face, combined with the choice to have him spitting out bratty one-liners and battle raps, grates in way that’s almost as if the director is deliberately trying to cut our sympathies with the protagonists.

Occasionally the best version of this movie peaks through the tone-deaf fog that shrouds the majority of its run-time. Dunagan and McRobbie are fully committed to their bizarre performances and, by the third act, a shreiky, camp quality, combined with a twisted sense of dark humor, gels together in a way that’s entertainingly misanthropic. But these moments are too few and infrequent and clang quite abrasively against Shyamalan’s ham-fisted themes about broken-homes and forgiveness.  I really wish I could join the sizable chorus calling this a return to form for the troubled filmmaker, but I simply don’t see much here that’s effective, evocative or even scary enough to give it a pass.

Grade: D+

Originally Published in the Idaho State Journal/Sep-2015