Film Review: The Visit

The Elder House Rules

A bit late I know for a review of The Visit, M. Night Shyamalan's return to the land of movie-making, but due to an all work and no play way of life at the moment, a trip to the cinema now feels more like a holiday instead of a bi-daily occurrence of which it once did. When before if I ever missed the pit-stop of being on-time with reviews of the week's movies I would simply move on and allow better, and much more educated, viewpoints to have their say without my own personal feelings on the matter surfacing onto the web, yet the release of The Visit put me in such a deep coma of confusion that I felt compelled to relay my own opinions onto you wonderful people who take the time to read my sometimes bloated, yet wholly organic take on the week's new movies. Whereas in the past director M. Night Shyamalan was lauded for critically acclaimed movies such as The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, his recent performances have been somewhat pants with straight-down-the-toilet releases such as After Earth and The Last Airbender tainting his reputation two-fold resulting in his return in the form of The Visit, a film so confused by its' own creation that it seemingly crosses between the boundaries of horror and comedy in such stark fashion that it fails to distinguish itself as nothing more than a movie that's smothered in marmite, and feels happy to be so.

Produced and released by those behind the downfall of horror cinema as we know it at Blumhouse Productions, The Visit attempts to distinguish itself from the annoyingly overused theme of found-footage by establishing itself as a pseudo-documentary, focusing on the reunion of both grandchildren and grandparents, whilst forming an overly confusing combination of cliched horror tropes, of which, are not very frightening, and black comedy, of which, isn't very funny, with crude toilet humour and the image of a naked elderly woman being the highlight of the film's comedic standpoint. With a supposed "twist" being not only a complete and utter let-down, but being seen from a mile off, it begs the question whether Shyamalan will ever return to the high watermark set at the early beginnings of his once promising career. The Visit isn't on the level of After Earth at least, but it's miles off the brilliance of The Sixth Sense and can only be regarded as a movie lost in its' own attempt to be both funny and scary but ends up not being entirely either.

Overall Score: 4/10