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| Directed and Written by M. Night Shyamalan |
Alo Party Peoples.
Once upon a time, there was an aspiring indie film maker from Pennsylvania that made a little movie about ghosts. This guy wasn't untalented, he seemed to have a Sixth Sense for narrative diversion. His movie was essentially an overlong Twilight Zone episode, but he was good enough at distracting the audience from the details that he kept them from putting the pieces together and realizing that the obvious answer to what was really going on... was exactly what was really going on.
He knew he was good at it, and over the years his confidence in his craft would become Unbreakable, but the Signs of a descent from greatness started showing up almost immediately. Since nearly everyone that was talking about his movie was talking about the twist, he was convinced that every movie afterwards had to have a twist too. He made two more movies after that, and reception was a lot more mixed, but overall people still seemed to like him. Some people even thought we had found the next great American auteur...and then with his very next project, M. Night Shyamalan had pissed it all away, and would continue to do so for over a decade. Film after film of accidental anti-classics, each passing project destined to become a staple of "ironic" comedy. It soon became clear that rather than a true successor to the Master of Suspense, Shyamalan had become the Master of Pretense.
Shyamalan is a failure, but he is admittedly an interesting one. He makes terrible, terrible movies, but he at least does so while trying to grow as a film maker, which is more than can be said for certain other filmmakers that the Internet loves to hate. He tries different styles and a ton of different genres, bouncing from old-school monster movies to fairy tales to apocalyptic horror to epic fantasy to a Hitchcockian thriller to a survivor's tale all in a row. That's a good thing, sometimes a radical shift in genre and tone is exactly what you need to get the magic back...
..but The Village, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, Devil, and After Earth were all terrible, and it's for a very specific reason. Regardless of what Shyamalan is trying to do, his massive, massive ego dooms it. In Lady, he fed a critic to a monster and cast himself as a misunderstood writer who's prose was going to save the world. The Happening took a premise as ridiculous and ripe for black comedy as pollen that makes you kill yourself and decides to play it completely straight. The Last Airbender is the best possible guide for what not to do when adapting a property to the silver screen, Devil takes a perfect nasty little thriller premise and negates all tension by awkwardly inserting the supernatural and putting it in the title, and After Earth casts Will Smith and decides to force him to hold back virtually all of his signature charisma.
And now we have The Visit, which sees Shyamalan, longing for the days when people took him seriously, limping back to the template of The Sixth Sense for another cheaply produced tale of wide eyed children navigating rejected Goosebumps pitches leading up to an obvious twist that is far too impressed with itself. Two siblings are sent to spend the weekend with their grandparents that they've never seen or even heard of before now after ambiguously ill circumstances surrounding their father's departure. The grandparents seem nice at first but soon begin exhibiting increasingly strange behavior that first seems like just the eccentricities of the old but ultimately turn out to be serious warning signs that something is afoot and they are stuck with two very dangerous people.
This is not a bad premise for a horror film. Taking the shared experience of being a child staying with an unfamiliar relative and being creeped out by their behavior and the environment and adding another layer of unease to the proceedings is the kind of old-school pulp fiction that has influenced the One-Twist Pony's work from the beginning. Hand this premise to Charlie Brooker or David Fincher, or even pre-Signs Shyamalan, and they probably could have hit it out of the park.
But the Shyamalan that made The Last Airbender is at this point so inept and convinced of his own greatness that he simply has no idea what he's doing. Any of the skill on display in Wayward Pines turns out to have been in spite of his involvement, because he really has left any genuine suspense chops he once possessed by the wayside. Case in point, The Visit is a found-footage movie, one of the kids is a wannabe film maker documenting their week, and rather than having any point to make with the motif, The Visit only uses it as an excuse to have characters monologue exposition, backstory, and character beats directly into the camera.
This isn't even getting into The Twist, which I won't spoil here, but I will say that it is so idiotic, and the entire screenplay bends over backwards to hide it for so long that you can't help but figure it out well in advance and negate all tension, though it does manage to avoid the awkward insertion of a completely different genre that doomed The Village and Devil.
The point that I completely gave up on The Visit is when, during an interview for the kid's documentary, the other child is questioned about his use of mise en scene and, after it turns out he has no idea what that means, he flips the bird directly to the camera. That, underneath the terrible screenplay, bad acting, and pointless faux-documentary camerawork, is The Visit's real reason for existing. As much as people have come to despise Shyamalan, it turns out that he hates them just as much if not more, and this entire movie is him flipping off all the critics that hate him, all the hipsters that watch him to laugh at him, and the film industry that may have (hopefully) finally had enough of him.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
FINAL RATING: 1/5
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