The Visit (2015) - Shyamalan's creepy mini-comeback

♥♥♥

 

+ Best $ Return of the Year: 19.68 Times 

 

An amusingly designed poster for M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit

 

A pair of teenage siblings are sent to visit their estranged grand parents' farmhouse by their single mother, who badly needs a cruise holiday with her new boyfriend. But grandma and grandpa turn out to be seriously weird.

Indian-American master writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's (Signs (2002)) mini-comeback, - after years of disappointments such as The Village (2004), Lady in the Water (2006), The Last Airbender (2010) and After Earth (2013), - is this youth found footage horror-comedy. It isn't solid cast, but it lives on four engaged main actors and Kathryn Hahn (Bad Moms (2016)) as the skyping mother. The two kids, Olivia DeJonge (Safe Neighborhood (2016)) and especially Ed Oxenbould (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day (2014)) give life and humor to the film. And the two elders, Peter McRobbie (Bridge of Spies (2015)) and especially Deanna Dunagan (The Naked Face (1984)) give the film its creepy wtf-moments. The Visit runs on what is not a bad story, and it is fairly inventively executed.

Unfortunately the pay-off, the film's climax, features a twist that seems a little too dark and gross. SPOILER There are also various gimmicks through the film that can't be joined credibly with the revelation that the two elders are 'merely' escaped insane hospital patients.

 

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2015 in films and TV-series - according to Film Excess [UPDATED IV]
 

Watch a short clip from the film here

Cost: 5 mil. $

Box office: 98.4 mil. $

= Huge hit

[The Visit premiered August 30 (Ireland) and runs 94 minutes. Filming began in February 2014 and took place in Pennsylvania and Florida, aboard the Royal Caribbean Allure of the Seas. Shyamalan has said in an interview that he struggled some during editing to hit the right tone in the film. The film opened #2, very slightly behind other newcomer The Perfect Guy, to a 25.4 mil. $ first weekend in North America, where it stayed in the top 5 for another week and grossed 65.2 mil. $ (66.3 % of the total gross.) The 2nd and 3rd biggest markets were Spain with 5.3 mil. $ (5.4 %) and Germany with 4.6 mil. $ (4.7 %). The Visit is fresh at 64 % with a 5.7 critical average at Rotten Tomatoes.]

What do you think of The Visit?