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The Visit:
Oh, M Night Shyamalan. You're like a psychotic ex-girlfriend, or that 4th bottle of Heineken. I know that it's bad for me, and I know that it will always end in disappointment, but I can't stay away. I was ready to officially give up, but The Visit got great reviews and I forced myself into a theater. Part of me wanted to love this movie. Part of me wanted to hate it. The actual experience was a weird one. I tried to trick myself into being cynical about everything, but about two thirds of the way through I gave in. This movie is good. If I'm feeling generous, I might even call it great. This is the first mainstream horror movie this year to understand my first rule of horror. Scary things are only scary if they happen to characters that I care about.
Who are these characters? A couple of teenagers and their grandparents. The kids are fascinating characters, because they are unique in today's cinematic landscape. The top billing goes to Olivia DeJonge, a 17 year old girl named Becca who plays an amateur documentary filmmaker. She has a surprising amount of layers. In plenty of ways, she's an easy device for M Night to talk directly to his audience. She's also disturbingly pretentious and still has a character of her own, her driving motivation being to help her mother feel better about herself after her husband left her. Her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), is pretty much the opposite form of entertainer. He's an amateur low brow rapper. He has essentially no rap or lyrical skills, but he still tries really hard to talk about bitches and hoes with little success. Like his sister, he goes beyond this to establish a character of his own, one who is trying to help his sister recover from the family split in the same way she tries to help their mother. The greatest strength of this film are that these characters are kids, because I think they would both be insufferable as adults. They're not realistic, but as kids their extremes are funny, and the fact that they have these ambitions at all is really nice. Their two grandparents are normal for a few hours, and they they're weird, and they they're really really weird. The moment when I knew I liked this film came during the closing credits, which are rapped over by Tyler while Becca looks at herself as she is brushing her hair. Both of these things are payoffs that were set up earlier, and they both just made me happy to be alive and watching it. I legitimately cared for these kids, enough to be happy when they got happy endings. These characters are directed, written, and acted well enough to feel real, to come out of the screen and make me feel emotions, which few movies can do.
The horror in this film is surprisingly good. Shyamalan goes back to his Sixth Sense roots by being more creepy than scary. There are no deaths or graphic blood in the first two acts, and there is only one jump scare in the whole run time. He limits his sound design to be appropriately subtle and realistic for the found footage setup. No single scene pops out as being freaky, but over time he adds up moderately unsettling scenes. There are about 10 by the end, where my reaction was that the thing I just saw kind of bothered me and I can't wait to see what it builds up to. I would describe it as a slow burn in that way, but the pacing is excellent because not a single scene is wasted. The found footage angle actually contributes to the quality of the film, words that I might never say again. The basic concept is that these kids are alone and too young to effectively handle the situation they are pushed into. Having a homey vibe and a decent but not great cinematography eye fits in with the characters and setting. Yes, it is dumb at times, like when they prop a night vision camera on top of a shelf and keep it static, but on the whole it progresses a character and arguably the story.
The comedic elements of this film were not quite as strong. Shyamalan said that three versions of this exist. There's supposedly a horror cut, a comedy cut, and the one we got in theaters is somewhere in between. I would rather have seen the first, but there were funny moments that worked. There weren't even many jokes, but the problem was that a lot of the jokes had more setup time than the punchline deserved. No single line stands out to me as especially good or bad, but I wish he could have cut that element altogether.
Another genius thing this film does is trick you with the trailer. I was there with everybody else, laughing at the commercial where the grandmother asks the girl to get into the oven and shuts it. Guess what? That happens twice in the film, and nothing comes from it in either instance. They are both mildly creepy scenes, but neither one of them ends in a typical horror movie fashion. She cleans the oven, the grandmother opens the door, and the scene ends. That is one of the most brilliant things I have seen on film this year. Take a perceived weakness and turn it into a strength, all while building tension without blowing your load on something that would be considered dumb. There are more scenes like that too, where you think you have already scene what is coming and the movie subverts your expectations in a clever and atmospheric way.
I'm not going to tell you that The Visit is a fantastic movie. Unfortunately, I don't think it could be. It's too short, low-budget, and most of all unambitious to reach the heights of a 5 star film. It is not as good as The Sixth Sense, and it is not as entertaining as The Happening. But I think that M Night could not have possibly executed it better. This is the definition of a film that is good for what it is. There's a lot of stuff that I wish was here, and it never gets into the territory of perfection, but there are very few flaws with what he gave us. For the first time in a decade, I am looking forward to the next M Night Shyamalan movie. What a twist!
The Visit:
Oh, M Night Shyamalan. You're like a psychotic ex-girlfriend, or that 4th bottle of Heineken. I know that it's bad for me, and I know that it will always end in disappointment, but I can't stay away. I was ready to officially give up, but The Visit got great reviews and I forced myself into a theater. Part of me wanted to love this movie. Part of me wanted to hate it. The actual experience was a weird one. I tried to trick myself into being cynical about everything, but about two thirds of the way through I gave in. This movie is good. If I'm feeling generous, I might even call it great. This is the first mainstream horror movie this year to understand my first rule of horror. Scary things are only scary if they happen to characters that I care about.
Who are these characters? A couple of teenagers and their grandparents. The kids are fascinating characters, because they are unique in today's cinematic landscape. The top billing goes to Olivia DeJonge, a 17 year old girl named Becca who plays an amateur documentary filmmaker. She has a surprising amount of layers. In plenty of ways, she's an easy device for M Night to talk directly to his audience. She's also disturbingly pretentious and still has a character of her own, her driving motivation being to help her mother feel better about herself after her husband left her. Her younger brother, Tyler (Ed Oxenbould), is pretty much the opposite form of entertainer. He's an amateur low brow rapper. He has essentially no rap or lyrical skills, but he still tries really hard to talk about bitches and hoes with little success. Like his sister, he goes beyond this to establish a character of his own, one who is trying to help his sister recover from the family split in the same way she tries to help their mother. The greatest strength of this film are that these characters are kids, because I think they would both be insufferable as adults. They're not realistic, but as kids their extremes are funny, and the fact that they have these ambitions at all is really nice. Their two grandparents are normal for a few hours, and they they're weird, and they they're really really weird. The moment when I knew I liked this film came during the closing credits, which are rapped over by Tyler while Becca looks at herself as she is brushing her hair. Both of these things are payoffs that were set up earlier, and they both just made me happy to be alive and watching it. I legitimately cared for these kids, enough to be happy when they got happy endings. These characters are directed, written, and acted well enough to feel real, to come out of the screen and make me feel emotions, which few movies can do.
The horror in this film is surprisingly good. Shyamalan goes back to his Sixth Sense roots by being more creepy than scary. There are no deaths or graphic blood in the first two acts, and there is only one jump scare in the whole run time. He limits his sound design to be appropriately subtle and realistic for the found footage setup. No single scene pops out as being freaky, but over time he adds up moderately unsettling scenes. There are about 10 by the end, where my reaction was that the thing I just saw kind of bothered me and I can't wait to see what it builds up to. I would describe it as a slow burn in that way, but the pacing is excellent because not a single scene is wasted. The found footage angle actually contributes to the quality of the film, words that I might never say again. The basic concept is that these kids are alone and too young to effectively handle the situation they are pushed into. Having a homey vibe and a decent but not great cinematography eye fits in with the characters and setting. Yes, it is dumb at times, like when they prop a night vision camera on top of a shelf and keep it static, but on the whole it progresses a character and arguably the story.
The comedic elements of this film were not quite as strong. Shyamalan said that three versions of this exist. There's supposedly a horror cut, a comedy cut, and the one we got in theaters is somewhere in between. I would rather have seen the first, but there were funny moments that worked. There weren't even many jokes, but the problem was that a lot of the jokes had more setup time than the punchline deserved. No single line stands out to me as especially good or bad, but I wish he could have cut that element altogether.
Another genius thing this film does is trick you with the trailer. I was there with everybody else, laughing at the commercial where the grandmother asks the girl to get into the oven and shuts it. Guess what? That happens twice in the film, and nothing comes from it in either instance. They are both mildly creepy scenes, but neither one of them ends in a typical horror movie fashion. She cleans the oven, the grandmother opens the door, and the scene ends. That is one of the most brilliant things I have seen on film this year. Take a perceived weakness and turn it into a strength, all while building tension without blowing your load on something that would be considered dumb. There are more scenes like that too, where you think you have already scene what is coming and the movie subverts your expectations in a clever and atmospheric way.
I'm not going to tell you that The Visit is a fantastic movie. Unfortunately, I don't think it could be. It's too short, low-budget, and most of all unambitious to reach the heights of a 5 star film. It is not as good as The Sixth Sense, and it is not as entertaining as The Happening. But I think that M Night could not have possibly executed it better. This is the definition of a film that is good for what it is. There's a lot of stuff that I wish was here, and it never gets into the territory of perfection, but there are very few flaws with what he gave us. For the first time in a decade, I am looking forward to the next M Night Shyamalan movie. What a twist!