The Visit

31 Days of Horror, Day 29

For a period of about five years, roughly around the turn of the century, M. Night Shyamalan was the shit. The Sixth Sense practically wrote the book on the whole plot-twist-you-did-not-see-coming thing. Then, Unbreakable came out, and it was the superhero origin story we didn’t know we needed. And maybe I was just at the right age, but there was something about Signs that genuinely terrified me.

Then, in 2004, The Village happened, and for the first time people saw the whole twist thing for what it really was — a gimmick to cover up holes in a threadbare story. I mean, really, no one from the outside world every stumbled upon the village? No one inside the village ever thought, “Gee, it’s kind of weird that there are monsters wandering outside the village, but they never bother to come into our homes at night and murder us all?”

And at some point after I stopped caring about this dude and his gimmicky movies he released some preachy garbage film about the environment getting its revenge on us, secured funding to make a movie out of a bedtime story he tells his kids and destroyed any hope of us ever getting a decent live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Yeah, I’m bitter.

But I will admit that Devil had its moments, even though the ending is telegraphed from the start because the antagonist is always the person you least expect. Point is, there are two distinct eras of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, and we’re still in the “How the Hell is This the Same Guy Who Directed Unbreakable?” era.

If it seems odd that I’ve been spending paragraphs of a review about The Visit not actually reviewing the movie in question, it’s because there isn’t a lot to say. Two kids, who, in one of the film’s more glaring flaws, use the word “proclivity” in everyday speech, board a train bound for their grandparents’ house in the countryside. Their mother hasn’t spoken to her parents in years, and the kids haven’t met them in person before. When they arrive, they discover that their grandparents are a little weird. Well, more than a little weird.

What follows is 80-odd minutes of ageism, plot holes the size of celebrity chef Giada de Laurentiis’s mouth and very little in the way of scares. Quite frankly, The Visit is barely a horror movie. The only times I was really unnerved were during the two scenes when the male lead attempts to rap in the whitest way possible.

And, much like The Village, this movie’s twist strains credulity. Without giving away too much, the following combination of parental neglect, security oversights and suspension of disbelief would have needed to take place in order for the twist to make sense:

Now, I’m not saying that The Visit is a misstep on the level of After Earth. Rather, it’s the Chili’s of movies — the kind you watch when you don’t want fine dining, but you have too much respect for yourself to eat at McDonald’s.

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