M. Night Shyamalan is a director cursed by his own devices - namely, the plot twist. You can't have the words M. Night Shyamalan anywhere in a film without expecting it. The two are linked like Hitchcock and blondes or Woody Allen and overly verbose dialogue. So it goes with The Visit, a slight return for M. Night Shyamalan to the genre that made him famous and introduced him to the world. Except, of course, there's a twist.
Two young children (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) are sent into the country by their mother, Kathryn Hahn, for a four-day visit with their estranged grandparents. The daughter, who's an aspiring filmmaker, decides to document the excursion and find out why her mother and grandparents are no longer on speaking terms and repair the damage between them. The children are met with theatre actors Peter McRobbie and Deanna Dunagan, who bring them back to their charming farmhouse and begin the process of getting to know one another. What begins as somewhat kooky behaviour by the grandparents soon becomes more and more sinister, with the grandfather dismissing both his and his grandmother's behaviour as signs of their advancing age. This grows to become more threatening and, for a few short minutes, there's a genuine sense of dread before it culminates in an extended horror sequence and - because it's an M. Night Shyalaman film - the glaringly obvious twist.
The child actors both give reasonably astute performances, although the precocious, seemingly worldly act is now so overdone as to be cliched. Thankfully, it's only present in the the girl whereas the boy is more happy-go-lucky and a little bit flighty. The actors who play the grandparents do a reasonably good job of charting the slide from kooky grandparents to, well, what they're eventually revealed to be. Meanwhile, the mother - who communicates with the children sporadically through Skype - serves as a sounding board for the children's fears.
The found-footage / documentary style is new for Shyamalan, although the script is so heavy-handed and cluttered that you're always sure that this is, in fact, a movie. What made found footage so effective when it was first introduced is that it truly blended the lines between fiction and reality. Now, of course, it's been so overused that it's lost any kind of creativity or credibility with audiences. Shyamalan addresses this is in a horribly high-horse speech about the line between reality television and documentary that's very grating. The guy who made The Happening thinks he can speak out against found-footage? Really?
For the most part, the film just doesn't work. The clues that lead to the eventual twist are so obvious and glaring that it may as well be attached to the opening credits. The performances range from just OK to downright campy whilst the central crux of the story - the children trying to bridge the gap between their mother and grandparents - is dumped around the middle point when they begin to impede on the horror and blatant jump-scares. Shyamalan's film career, however, won't suffer too much from this. It is the best film he's made in years, but when we look back over his work, that's really not saying a whole lot. It was made for $5,000,000 and will undoubtedly recoup that at least four times over in the opening weekend. No doubt he'll return to horror with a twist ending again at some point, but at least his TV show, Wayward Pines, is half-decent, right?