Review of The Visit (2015) by Filipeneto — 10 May 2020

When I prepare to see a film directed or written by Night Shyamalan, I never know what I'm going to get. As I said in other reviews of his films, he has creativity but does not always get a positive result from his effort, going from genius to goofy at a glance and having brilliant films with a lot of mediocre efforts in between.

In this film, two brothers go to visit their grandparents so that their mother can go on vacation. They have never seen their grandparents, or at least they have not been with them for years, and the elderly seem radiant and everything is going well... until grandma begins to reveal somewhat strange habits and everything starts to look tense. The script plays well with signs of senility and alzheimer's, which are common among the elderly, to create a tense environment that also spreads to the audience. However, other than that, the film has little story to tell and high doses of melodrama that clash a little with the global picture. The film contains a twist near the end as the director usually does. This turnaround is good and prepares the final climax, worthy of a horror movie... but this ending is too long, it would have had more impact if it were shorter and more sudden.

The cast is headed by two young actors, Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould. Olivia stands out clearly and shows promising signs about her career. The grandparents, Peter McRobbie and Deanna Dunagan, were also very good, truly convincing in the way they brought their characters to life. Deana, in particular, deserves real praise. At the opposite end is Kathryn Hahn, totally artificial as mother. This character was very poorly thought and sounds false all the time.

Technically, the film is poor, perhaps even the poorest of the Shyamalan work I have ever seen, with strict regard to production values and technical aspects. The idea of young people recording testimonials for a kind of homemade documentary sounds false and only works as a justification for a "found footage". The total amateurism of cinematography, which is almost always shaky, out of focus, without light or too bright, clashes with the number of professional cameras that children had at their disposal, always appearing in the shooting angle of each other. If the idea was for children to shoot an amateur film, how can the cameras be so many and so good? Did they have wealthy parents?

Okay, I recognize that this film is not one of the worst in Shyamalan's career. But the fact is that it is also not a success or deserves to be seen more than once. With poor production values, a little-known but capable cast, a weak story, full of inconsistencies but that manages to intimidate the audience, is an average and forgettable film.