It’s been a while since the auteur sometimes known as “Midnight Shyamalan” has been present and accounted for. Way back in the early 2000’s, he scored several big hits, especially with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs, all movies laden with strangeness, clues, foreshadowing and twisty endings. After those hits, things started to turn sour and subsequent movies didn’t do so well. His latest, The Visit, gets off to a strange start when a single mom, abandoned suddenly by her “loving husband” several years ago, sends her kids packing, with cameras computers and Amtrak tickets, to spend a week with her parents while she parties on a cruise ship. They are to spend a week with her parents in Nowhere, Pennsylvania, way out on the farm in an old house, in the winter and fog. “Mom” (Kathlyn Hahn) has not spoken to her parents in 15 years after some sort of mysterious, acrimonious break, but thinks that her kids need to get to know them. Hmmmmm. Her kids are amateur videographers, making a movie about their trip, somewhat like what Shyamalan did when he was a kid. The grand parents are well regarded people who do volunteer counseling in a local hospital.
Being a “Midnight” film, you probably already know that things are not going to go well. The old folks are welcoming, cookie baking, wood chopping retirees, with a nice old historic house in the woods, no TV, no cable, no cell phone reception, but somehow there is internet in the house so the kids can Skype their partying mom. Well….things just go downhill from there. There’s nothing to do and the house rules are lights out at 9:30, doors locked, no going outside your room. It quickly becomes apparent to the kids (who are documenting all this in their movie) that the old folks are really strange. “Nana” creeps around on all fours, runs naked around the house after dark and Pop-Pop saves his poopy diapers in a pile in the barn. It only gets worse from there as the fiction that they are well adjusted retirees evaporates while the kids still have 6 days to go. Some discussions between the kids and the grandparents reveal that Grandma is in early dementia, suffering from “sundowning”, which causes her to get weird at night (hence the 9:30 lights out rule). Pop-Pop is incontinent, and somewhat obsessive. Yeah, but….that’s only the beginning. Crazy grandparents, out in the country, nobody knows you’re there, Mom’s on the party cruise…the kid’s movie is not going to be fun. As you might expect from a Shyamalan movie, there will be a twisty ending that resolves all of the strange clues that you’ve been trying to figure out.
Is Shymalan back? Did you ever like his old movies? Well, I did like Sixth Sense for one viewing (once I knew the end, there was no need to see the movie again) and enjoyed Signs. Those and The Village were filmed partially around Doylestown, PA and Delaware Valley College, a place that’s familiar to me, so I had some interest there. Today’s question, however, is whether I liked The Visit. No that much really. It’s sorta tense, but the thrills are mainly of the cheap bump-in-the-night sort. The plot had very little credibility, like what mom would really send her kids off like that after a 15 year break, to parents she hasn’t even spoken to? The grandmom’s problem, sundowning, is a real problem for people with dementia, but it begins at sundown, which comes about 6:00 in southern PA in the dead of winter, not at 9:30. The house is completely off the grid, but the kids are Skyping their mom. When it does become clear what’s going on, that’s just a cheap horror movie device too. I expected better, but didn’t get it. The horror component just isn’t that scary and the plot is full of holes. Acting by the kids (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) is the best part of the movie; they are good at being terrified. The old folks, Nana and Pop-Pop are competent in their creepy decay and Mom is adequate at being a jerk. I found a lot of the super close-up, first person, shaky-cam cinematography (presumably the kid’s video footage) to be really annoying, without any benefit to the story. A more solid, conventional approach to the story, with conventional cinematography would have made a better movie. The movie got many more audience laughs than it did screams. Oh well, not this time for Midnight. I’m giving this one a 1.5. I’ve seen worse, but not this year.
