Occam's Razor

Director M. Night Shyamalan, perhaps best known for The Sixth Sense is going back to his roots in this movie, i.e. do something on the cheap and hope that cheap gets better reviews than he’s gotten recently with his many big budget failures, like After Earth. In the creepy horror movie genre being cheap means hiring mostly no name actors, using natural locations and a small cast. If being cheap doesn’t work, well, there’s less financial jeopardy. If it does those union minimum wages don’t matter from all the residuals that pour in. In The Visit, it also means trying to reuse a formula I think first successfully pioneered in The Blair Witch Project, i.e. make the movie look like it’s being filmed by its participants to enhance its sense of realism. The formula can work but only if it’s not used very often. Blair Witch had plenty of imitators, and none that I recall that were successful, but that was sixteen years ago and if anyone can make it work then presumably Shyamalan can.

Teenager Becca (Olivia DeJonge) is supposedly making a documentary about her and her brother Tyler’s (Ed Oxenbould) visit to grandma and grandpa, or Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) in their case. The movie has to hang on an unusual premise or two. In this case it’s that their mother (Kathryn Hahn) left her parents for good at nineteen and hadn’t seen them since then. (Hint: this will prove pivotal.) She still doesn’t want to see them but does manage to reconcile enough by phone to send Becca and Tyler on an Amtrak train to see them for the first time. Mom gets to go on a cruise while Becca brings along an expensive looking Canon digital movie camera and a laptop with an apparently excellent built in camera. Nana and Pop Pop live in a place so remote there is no cell service but not so remote that they don’t have high speed Internet. Tyler gets into the project and plays second camera. Becca is the sober older sister and Tyler is her spirited brother with an interest in rap music and a germ phobia. Tyler’s peculiarities are of course one of many hooks that Shyamalan introduces that will prove pivotal to the plot.

Still, this is a horror movie so we know it will get increasingly creepy and serious, so the only question is how. I won’t spoil too much but it’s not too hard to figure out as Nana and Pop Pop are counselors but recently unexpectedly stopped their work. And of course they are a bit peculiar. Nana likes her built in stove nice and clean and wants Becca to go fully into it to clean it. Pop Pop frequently goes to a shed on the property with paper bags. They are warned not to go into the basement because of mold and never to get out of their bedroom after 9:30 PM … the old folks like their rest and don’t want to be disturbed.

Of course all sort of disturbing stuff happens after 9:30 PM and during the day for that matter, much of it filmed digitally on Becca’s camera and laptop that follows they everywhere they go. Nana projectile vomits and scratches the walls at night, and Pop Pop depends on Adult Depends. Both Becca and her brother are reasonably interesting teens, with Tyler perhaps being the more interesting and quirky. There’s lots of peculiar things in this plot, such as how their mother, a Walmart sales associate can afford to take a cruise and give her children such nice laptops and cameras. She must have gotten a hell of an employee discount.

The movie is engaging and creepy enough, but not terribly surprising as it moves toward its climax. It’s more scary than horrifying and only marginally gross. Of course the best horror movies leave the horror mostly to the imagination. Shyamalan gets you halfway there in The Visit. This is not Psycho or The Birds but Shyamalan is not Hitchcock either. He’s done better than this, just not recently. If the movie’s goal is to get a profit, it’s bound to do so but probably won’t turn into a cult hit. Maybe it doesn’t matter, except to Shyamalan’s standard of living. Shyamalan already has The Sixth Sense and probably nothing he does will come close to this cult masterpiece.

3.0 out of four-points.

[xrr rating=3/4]