M. Night Shyamalan built a career on the twist, and The Visit is the rare one that arrives without a supernatural excuse. Two kids, one farmhouse, one camcorder, and a set of grandparents who are not what they seem. It is a found footage horror film, released by Universal Pictures in North America on September 11, 2015, and it runs 94 minutes. Eleven years on, it still holds up as the movie that steadied Shyamalan’s career — critics at the time called it a return-to-form, and the reasons are worth naming precisely.
Trailer, via Universal Pictures.
Becca, Tyler, and the Camcorder
Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) live in Philadelphia with their divorced mother, Loretta (Kathryn Hahn). Loretta has not spoken to her parents in fifteen years. They disapproved of her marrying her high school teacher, and she never repaired the breach. Now she goes on a cruise with her boyfriend and sends her children, sight unseen, to a Pennsylvania farm to meet grandparents they have never met.
The teens plan to record a documentary about their visit using a camcorder. That is the whole engine of The Visit: two teenagers filming their way into a house that does not want to be filmed.
Nana and Pop Pop’s Rules
Deanna Dunagan plays Nana. Peter McRobbie plays Pop Pop. They meet the kids at a train station and drive them to an isolated farmhouse. Two rules come with the room: never go into the basement, and never leave the bedroom past 9:30 p.m.
The rules are not the horror. The horror is how quickly the rules start to make sense. Becca catches Nana projectile vomiting. Nana chases the teens during a game of hide-and-seek. Tyler finds a pile of soiled diapers in the shed. Pop Pop attacks a man in town he believes is following them.
When the kids push back, the grandparents deflect onto each other. Pop Pop says Nana is sundowning. Nana says Pop Pop is incontinent. Each explanation is plausible. Each one is also a way of not answering the question.
A Cobbler and a Knife
Stacey (Celia Keenan-Bolger) is a woman Nana and Pop Pop helped in counseling. She brings a blueberry cobbler to thank them. She is not seen leaving.
Tyler sets a camera to film the living room overnight. Nana finds it. She tries to break into the children’s locked bedroom with a knife, and fails. Becca and Tyler call Loretta and beg her to come get them. Loretta asks where the grandparents are. Tyler points the laptop’s webcam out the window.
The film’s documentary-style footage evolves into mystery-solving and evidence collection. That turn is the one moment The Visit earns outright. Everything before it is a slow build of small wrongnesses. Everything after it is a race.
The Two Grandparents, Compared
| Nana | Pop Pop | |
|---|---|---|
| Played by | Deanna Dunagan | Peter McRobbie |
| First seen | Train station | Train station |
| Described by the other as | Sundowning | Incontinent |
| Signature scene | Chasing the teens in hide-and-seek | Attacking a man in town |
| Defense | Blames Pop Pop | Blames Nana |
The table is the film’s whole argument in miniature. Neither grandparent is the reliable one. The kids have no adult to trust, and the audience has no adult to trust either. That is a harder trick than it sounds, and The Visit pulls it off for most of its runtime.
The parallel pieces of the setup:
- The camcorder, which Becca treats as a serious instrument
- The 9:30 p.m. curfew, which the film never lets you forget
- The basement door, which the film also never lets you forget
- The blueberry cobbler, which arrives and does not leave
That is a clean machine. Shyamalan writes and directs, and for once the writing is doing the work the directing usually has to cover for.
Where It Comes Apart
The problem is the back half. Once the mystery starts resolving, The Visit stops being a movie about two kids and a camera and becomes a movie about getting to the ending. The evidence-collection phase is thin. Becca and Tyler gather clues, but the clues do not build so much as queue.
The performances carry more than the script does in those stretches. DeJonge plays Becca as watchful and slightly too composed for her age, which is exactly right. Oxenbould plays Tyler as a kid performing confidence he does not have, and the film leans on him for its lighter moments. Dunagan and McRobbie are the reason the first hour works. They are not playing monsters. They are playing people whose behavior has stopped being explicable, which is scarier.
Kathryn Hahn gets almost nothing to do as Loretta, and that is a waste. The mother is the film’s actual mystery — why she sent her children to strangers — and The Visit resolves her in a line rather than a scene.
The Verdict on The Visit
The Visit grossed $98.5 million worldwide against a $5 million production budget, and critics received it positively, many calling it a return-to-form for Shyamalan. That is a remarkable return on a small film.
But a return to form is not the same as a great film. The Visit is a tight, effective, occasionally genuinely upsetting horror movie that runs out of ideas about twenty minutes before it runs out of runtime. The camcorder gimmick is a real constraint, not a marketing hook, and Shyamalan uses it better than most directors who have tried. The 9:30 rule and the basement door are the two best decisions in the script. The knife at the bedroom door is the best decision in the direction.
What holds it back is that the ending explains rather than unsettles. The film spends an hour building dread out of not knowing, then spends its last act telling you. The cobbler is a great detail. The webcam is a great reveal. Neither one needs the exposition that follows.
This is a good movie with a great first hour, and it is worth watching for Dunagan and McRobbie alone. It is not the comeback critics described. It is the movie that showed the comeback was possible.
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