By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — For detractors of director M. Night Shyamalan – that is, for anyone who sees his career as having gone downhill ever since he scored big with The Sixth Sense in 1999 – The Visit may represent something of a comeback.
Come to think of it, given that his last three outings were The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth, it would be difficult for anyone not to see it that way.
If nothing else, The Visit brings a touch of originality and freshness to the found-footage horror genre, which Shyamalan takes to as if it’s been his stomping ground for years.
(2½ stars out of 4)
Kathryn Hahn, as the divorced mother of teenage siblings Becca and Tyler, played by Aussie actors Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, left home at 19 to be with an older man and, a conflict and fight having ensued, hasn’t spoken to her parents, played by Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie, ever since.
But the grandparents manage to track her down and request that their grandkids come pay a visit to their Nana and Pop Pop, whom they have never even met.
So Mom sends the kids to their grandparents’ isolated farmhouse in the woods in a small Pennsylvania town for a week while she goes on vacation with her new boyfriend.
Fifteen-year-old Becca, an aspiring filmmaker who wants to use her skills to solve the mystery of why their mother is estranged from her folks and perhaps mend the family’s fences, brings her cameras along to document their journey, alongside the germaphobic 13-year-old wannabe-rapper, Tyler.
Things start off well enough, but soon the kids notice their grandparents exhibiting some creepily strange behaviors. Especially Nana, who not only does plenty of nocturnal sleepwalking, but appears to be suffering from a mental disorder called “sundowning,” which affects her behavior after 9:30 at night.
Maybe that’s why one of her house rules – along with “Have a great time” and “Eat as much as you want” — is that the kids shouldn’t leave their rooms after 9:30 p.m.
Oh, and why in the world does Pop Pop keep disappearing into the shed carrying an axe?
Suddenly, the kids would prefer to go home and, on the phone, begin begging their mother to pick them up.
Writer-producer-director Shyamalan (Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water) has some understated thematic fun with the prejudices and antipathies we have about the elderly because we are so creeped out about where we know we’re headed some day, and provides breathing room for the intimate family melodrama that tucks itself into the flashy horror show.
By adopting a pseudo-documentary style, he dials down his usual intensity level and includes enough humor along the way for the film to qualify as a horror comedy. And yet he’s serious enough about the scare elements in the form of shock cuts – effectively sprung, by the way — along with plenty of slow-build suspense and his signature ninth-inning twist for the film to present itself as a fright flick with a sense of humor.
As for the acting, it’s fine, especially the work of the two youngsters.
Unfortunately, the third act doesn’t quite develop into the topper of a climax that the first two acts seem to be nudging us toward, but the humor-and-horror duplex is nonetheless in move-in condition.
So we’ll drop in on 2½ stars out of 4 for the comedic fright flick, The Visit. Here’s to M. Night Shyamalan reclaiming his audience with a film about which they’ll feel discomfited and entertained rather than visited upon.
