To Grandma's house we go

Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie in a scene from "The Visit." Image courtesy Universal Pictures.

“The Visit” is M. Night Shyamalan's necessary attempt to step away from the horror field and reinvent himself as something more than a Hitchcock yawn, or at least as a better director than his recent gun-for-hire flicks indicate. It’s very much a departure from what he’s done before: the filmmaking technique is less trained; the tone is lighter (there are many moments purporting to be comedy, and Shyamalan even pokes fun at himself a hint); and the director stays well off the screen. Those tweaks help form a more interesting film than Shyamalan has done in a long while, and they even help craft 10 good minutes of tension in the third act.

But the shifts are undermined by a few are cheesy Shyamalan idiosyncrasies, all of which undermine his plan to escape from himself. So yes, “The Visit” has a twist – I won't spoil it, but it's not an overly surprising one – along with lazy, unmissable foreshadowing akin. Also, like much of Shyamalan's work, “The Visit” features people acting strangely for mysterious reasons the writer/director will reveal at a time of great import.

Twists are important.

Those familiarities are wrapped in a whole new format for the Pepsi ONE De Palma, as Shyamalan joins the faux-documentary style as seen in films like “Paranormal Activity,” “Cloverfield,” and 40 percent of the horror films streaming on Netflix. The person behind the camera for this fake documentary is precocious 15-year-old Becca (Olivia DeJonge), an aspiring director who on a trip with younger brother/wannabe rapper Tyler (Ed Oxenbloud) to visit their grandparents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) for a week. This isn't the average trip to grandma's house though; the children haven't met their grandparents before due to falling out with their mother (Kathryn Hahn, who pops in and out of the film via Skype) due to an affair Hahn had with an older man.

The titular visit begins swimmingly for all involved, with the children giving nicknames to their grandparents – Nana and Pop Pop – and the older couple baking cookies and chopping firewood in their rural Pennsylvania home. Then things become a little funky when the hosts exhibit some rather peculiar behavior that worsens as the days go by and the kids learn a little more about their hosts.

The strangeness is captured via the use of a pair of video cameras operated by DeJonge and Oxenbloud, and the genre's main question of “who did the editing?” is solved at the end in a technically logical but still kind of stupid fashion. But aside from providing an answer to that question, Shyamalan doesn't do anything of note or true interest with the format; rather, he relies on the same tricks exhibited in “The Blair Witch Project,” “The Last Exorcism,” “REC,” and a whole host of others.  

“The Visit” would benefit greatly if Shyamalan had taken ownership of the format, although the style is more of a device the director uses to shift away from dourness and into a lighter, more playful mood. Compared to the visual and tonal darkness Shyamalan usually revels in, “The Visit” is a comparably happy little ditty, one in which Oxenbloud spends a fair amount of time attempting to rap and Dunagan shows much more of herself than Tony-award winner often wood. The director even gets in a few fart and poop jokes along the way.

What a twist!

It is nice to see Shyamalan try something different; the shame of it is he doesn’t work. His sense of humor is trite and childish, and it’s often derived from cruelty toward people with mental illness, as if the man was pointing at the frail elderly couple and saying “old people, am I right?”

Then again, the lighter tone does provide a nice contrast for when the shenanigans get real and the consequences of the requisite big twist arrive. Shyamalan delivers 10 minutes of quality tension and strangeness in which almost anything can happen. He builds it up steadily and wonderfully… at least until he misses the landing, breaks his ankle, stands up to an imaginary round of applause, then somehow breaks his other ankle while attempting a victory lap. That's what makes Shyamalan so frustrating; the man has oodles of talent and some nifty ideas, but he just can't deliver them without trying to impress himself first.

“The Visit” is at its best a tease, a film that shows exactly what the legendary in his own mind director is capable of. It at least doesn't achieve the levels of risible Shyamalan has reached in recent years, although it's not a particularly good or memorable film. That, somehow, makes it the best film Shyamalan has done in more than a decade.

Thanks to Reddit for doing the work for me.

Review: Two out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer. 

Rating: PG-13

Run time: 94 minutes

Genre: Thriller

Ask Away

Target audience: People hoping for M. Night Shyamalan to make another (or a) good film.

Take the whole family?: Some unexpected nudity and cursing makes it inappropriate for anyone below the 12-13 age range.

Theater or Netflix?: Another log for the Netflix/Amazon pyre.

Has M. Night Shyamalan ever made a good film?:  Perhaps one, although even his more famous films aren't actually that good when viewed for a second time. The twists that define films “Signs” and “The Sixth Sense” are clumsy and notably forced upon, and “The Village” falls apart with that asinine final twist. Shyamalan does have one rather good film under his belt in “Unbreakable,” which remains one of the best super hero films of the last 20 years.

Watch this instead?: For found footage types of films, "[REC"] is great, the first two “V/H/S” movies are at least pretty entertaining, and “the Last Exorcism” is interesting until the last 10 minutes or so. For anyone looking for a film to mess with them a bit, watch either version of “Funny Games.”