Late Movie Review: The Visit (2015)

Hello all,

Forgive the delay, some timetables shuffled and I find myself currently living under a new roof with plans to move again in the near future. But in the meantime I will do my best to keep these going as often as I can. So let’s begin this new review by quickly touching on it’s director M. Night Shyamalan. Now I did like Unbreakable, The Sixth Sense and The Village (in that order), but Signs was awful, and I’ve skipped everything else done by him but I will make note of how many people I know who hated The Last Airbender movies who were fans of the show. So I was a bit hesitant at first to see it but I heard a few rumblings about it and well, how did it do?

Plot Summary - Rebecca Jamison (Olivia DeJonge), an amateur filmmaker who’s making a documentary about her mother, and her wannabe rapper brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent by their mother to visit their grandparents for the very first time. As the days go along, Rebecca and Tyler start to find out about their grandparents strange behaviour and begin to suspect things are not what they seem to be.

Pros - The actors are pretty good, in order being Deanna Dunagan as the grandmother, who manages to perfectly switch between overly loving grandma and creepy sleepwalker when needed. The kids are really good too, although Rebecca does more of the heavy lifting than Tyler, Rebecca (and some people are going to laugh at me for this statement) switching from being the in control older sister and the artsy filmmaker who feels the need to use as many fancy words as she can. The story manages to balance horror elements and a surprising amount of comedic moments as well. The way the film is shot, is more like Rebecca filming a documentary as opposed to be a found footage type movie, which is an improvement for the most part, so you don’t have any real background music there to build up the tension, instead relying on what’s going on screen to the job itself.

Cons - The grandfather is a bit of a one note character, as when he switches between nice and crazy it doesn’t really feel like too much of a difference. And while like I said it is shot more documentary style than found footage, it still hits a couple of the found footage sour notes that some people have found overdone. The backstory to why they’re making the doc in the first place is a bit convoluted, and finally there is the biggest elephant in the room of the film. Yes, there is a twist ending, no I’m not going to say what it is. Now, I will say that the twist isn’t saved until the very end, so we do actually get to see the results of the revelation actually play out for the last twenty minutes or so of the movie. The problem is is the fact that M. Night still feels the need to use them.

Final Score - 7/10

Someone described this film as a solid base hit of a back from retirement baseball player and I think that’s fair. It’s a solid effort and a surprisingly good pg rated horror film.

Next weekend sees four films released widely (I assume) and three of them look really good. I will try my best to see all of them. Black Mass will probably be the first one and I will try my hardest to see the other ones quickly.

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.