The Visit (2015)

I guess I don't really need to go too deep into the conversation about how M. Night Shyamalan's movies have been terrible for the last decade or so. They have been, in sometimes stunning fashion, and we all know it.  So let's just move on, ok?

And I'm not going to go so far as all the critics claiming that his new film, The Visit, is a return to form. This isn't on the level of The Sixth Sense... or even Signs, probably. A few critics are going nuts for it because Shyamalan's last five or so movies have been so godawful that the bar has been lowered basically to ground level.

But, for what it is, The Visit is pretty damn good.

Might it be that Shyamalan has finally been humbled after all the vitriol that has been thrown at him since roughly The Village (2004)? I'm guessing that's part of it. But there's another player in the game here, and I think its influence on the film — a sort of retro found-footage movie about two kids sent off to visit a pair of maniacal grandparents they've never met before — needs to be acknowledged.

That other player, of course, is Blumhouse Productions. The company basically owes its existence to the Paranormal Activity franchise, and is best known for producing generally unimpressive but successful horror movies like Sinister (2012), The Purge (2013), and the moderately more artful Insidious series. They made their bid for an Oscar last year with Whiplash, which managed to be more intense and horrifying than anything else they've produced.

It's a bit odd to imagine Blumhouse teaming up with Shyamalan, and I'd love to know the inside story of how this came together. I'm guessing a significant part of it is the fact that there aren't a lot of other companies willing to work with the director anymore, and Blumhouse knew they could probably get him cheap.

But somehow this collaboration becomes more than the sum of its parts, bringing out the best of each other without indulging in the worst. For his part, Shyamalan's most turgid instincts seem to have been somewhat mitigated by the lean-and-mean, straight-to-the-point Blumhouse ethos. The Visit falls pretty squarely between the Paranormal Activity found-footage thing and the slightly more elevated sensibility of Insidious, and the constraints don't allow him to go up his own ass the way he's been prone to do.

The constraints suit him well. He's still got enough storytelling spark and visual flare to class up the joint a bit, and in The Visit he managed to conjure up a few of the most startling and genuinely upsetting horror images I've seen in a while.

I don't want to oversell it; there's nothing particularly mind blowing here, and the movie doesn't have anywhere near the energy or originality of recent movies like It Follows and The Babadook. But by and large it all works, and some of what he delivers is truly scary.

It's also legitimately funny, which I didn't expect. Shyamalan has shown a moderate ability with humor in the past (particularly in Signs), but he manages to really nail it here. The two young leads, Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould, are saddled with the sort of cutesy precocious kid roles that normally make me want to claw my eyes out. But these kids can act, and they have a genuine sibling chemistry between them. DeJonge takes Rebecca, the older of a two and an aspiring filmmaker, and makes her pretensions charming rather than grating. And Oxenbould's Tyler, an aspiring rapper (yep, that's right), is often laugh-out-loud hilarious. But when it's time for them to be scared and deliver the horror-movie goods, they do. Oxenbould's is the showier performance, but he manages to spin Tyler's manic energy into a genuine ferocity toward the end that is more than a little frightening and definitely unexpected.

But the real stars of the show here are Peter McRobbie and Deanna Dunagan as "Pop-Pop" and "Nana." They deliver the sort of tour-de-force genre performances that deserve Oscar consideration but never get it. At first you're charmed by them, then you're sort of laughing at them, then you're a little uncomfortable around them... and then you're absolutely terrified.

I kind of hope this Shyamalan/Blumhouse partnership continues. It's too early to call this a comeback, but I can say for the first time in years I'm actually excited to see his next movie.