The Visit

This is what happens when a filmmaker truly lets go of the reigns, and just has fun when making a movie.  The Visit is one of the more joyful mainstream thrillers I have seen in quite a while.  It's exciting, creepy and weird, and you can picture in your mind the grin that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan had on his face while he was dreaming this stuff up.  It's also often hilarious, as at its heart, the film is a comedy.

This must have been a very liberating film for Shyamalan, whose last few films have been plodding, overly serious and gotten bad laughs from the audience.  This time he has let go of all pretensions and just wants his audience to have a great time.  And we do, because not only is the filmmaker in on the joke, so is the cast.  This is the kind of movie that demands to be seen with the right audience who is there for a good time, and laugh and clap at the appropriate moments.  It's exuberant in a way few thrillers these days are.  Even when it's creating suspense, there is a sense of devilish glee behind it.  And even though the movie is a "found footage" thriller, it's been filmed in such a way as to avoid motion sickness, and doesn't turn into a blurry mess whenever something scary happens.  It's actually one of the better shot and better looking examples of the genre I have seen.

The premise is simplicity itself - A single mother raising two kids (Kathryn Hahn) is going through a bad divorce with her ex-husband who cheated on her, and is now starting to regret how she ended her relationship with her parents.  When she was 19, she ran off with the guy she eventually married, which created a rift with her parents, whom she has not seen since then.  But now, her parents have reached out to her on Facebook, and want to see their grandchildren, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould).  And so, mom puts the kids on a train, and sends them to the isolated old farmhouse where she grew up as a kid.  Young Becca is an aspiring filmmaker, and she decides to make a documentary about their first visit to their grandparents.  She hopes to interview them and get their honest thoughts about their mother, so that she can help bridge the gap that has grown over the years between them.

The kids meet their grandparents, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), and at first everything seems like something out of a fairy tale.  Nana is a sweet natured old woman who basically lives in the kitchen, baking treats seemingly 24-7.  Pop Pop does most of the work on the farm, and tells the kids that he hasn't seen old Nana so happy in years ever since they came for their week-long visit.  But then, little by little, Nana and Pop Pop start acting very strange.  Becca initially chalks their behavior up to old age, but Tyler thinks there is something off about this seemingly sweet old couple.  Why does Pop Pop act so secretive when he goes to the shed outside?  Why won't they allow the kids to go in the basement?  And what is that strange scratching sound the kids hear outside their door every night?  The kids start leaving video equipment in certain rooms, hoping to capture what's going on.  What they discover is so gleefully disturbing, it will have audiences laughing and screaming at the same time.

The Visit gets a lot of mileage out of its cast, who nails the proper tone.  The kids are hilarious most of the time, but also smart and resilient.  Ed Oxenbould as younger brother Tyler gets some of the biggest laughs in the film, especially concerning a hilarious running gag where he tries to stop swearing so much by replacing obscenities with the names of female pop singers. (When he trips and falls, he screams out "Sarah McLachlan!".) And as the bizarre Nana and Pop Pop, Dunagan and McRobbie strike the perfect balance of innocence and malice.  There is a memorable sequence concerning Nana under the floorboards of the house which manages to be terrifying, but ends on a playful note, and even a big laugh.  In his past few films, Shyamalan has usually gotten wooden or uninspired performances from his actors, but here, the cast strikes a natural tone.  For all the weirdness that happens in the film, his characters and the performances are grounded in some kind of reality.

I also admired the way that Shyamalan leaves some subtle hints that may or may not lead to the answer behind the strange behavior of Nana and Pop Pop.  It sparks the mind, and creates a lot of possible answers for the audience to toy themselves with.  There is talk of aliens and other strange creatures, including werewolves.  The fact that there are a lot of shots of the full moon in the night sky in this film leads some credibility to that theory.  Naturally, I'm not going to say what the real answer is, but it is a pretty good one that had some audience members gasping when it was revealed.  This is one time where the director's love of twist endings works in his favor.  It makes sense, and does not leave the audience feeling cheated.

Does The Visit mark a turnaround for the troubled filmmaker, whose career seems to have been in free fall for the past 10 years?  It's too soon to say, but I am optimistic.  This is the most energetic and entertaining film I have seen from him.  This is not a complex movie, but it's been joyfully made and is just a lot of fun to watch. 

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