Cinematographer Maryse Alberti creates the illusion that the film is being made by kids, but also avoids the nauseating hand-held stuff that dogs the found-footage style.
"Your sweater is on backwards." As he grills her, he zooms in on her, keeping her face off-center, blurry grey-trunked trees filling most of the screen. " Tyler, filming his sister, asks her why she never looks in the mirror. He falls, and screams, "Sarah McLachlan!" When terrified, he whispers to himself, " Katy Perry. Tyler informs his sister that he wants to stop swearing so much, and instead will say the names of female pop singers. And the kids are great, funny and distinct. What they see is more than they (and we) bargained for.ĭunagan and McRobbie play their roles with a melodramatic relish, entering into the fairy-tale world of the film. They sneak the camera into the barn, underneath the house, they place it on a cabinet in the living room overnight, hoping to get a glimpse of what happens downstairs after they go to bed. What is Pop Pop doing out in the barn all the time? Why does Nana ask Becca to clean the oven, insisting that she crawl all the way in? What are those weird sounds at night from outside their bedroom door? They have a couple of Skype calls with Mom, and she reassures them their grandparents are "weird" but they're also old, and old people are sometimes cranky, sometimes paranoid.Īs the weirdness intensifies, Becca and Tyler's film evolves from an origin-story documentary to a mystery-solving investigation. Pop Pop ( Peter McRobbie) is a taciturn farmer who reminds the kids constantly that he and Nana are "old."īut almost immediately, things get crazy. Nana ( Deanna Dunagan), at first glance, is a Grandma out of a storybook, with a grey bun, an apron, and muffins coming out of the oven every hour. Becca uses a fairy-tale word to explain what she wants their film to do - it will be an "elixir" to bring home to Mom. They are worried about the effect their grandparents' rejection had on their mother (similar to Cole's worry about his mother's unfinished business with her own parent in "The Sixth Sense"). The kids are happy to meet their grandparents. Becca has done her homework about film-making, and instructs her younger brother about "frames" and "mise-en-scène." Tyler, an appealing gregarious kid, keeps stealing the camera to film the inside of his mouth and his improvised raps. It ratchets up the dread.īecca ( Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler ( Ed Oxenbould) want to make a film about their mother's lost childhood home, a place they know well from all of her stories. These choices launch us into the overblown operatic horror style while commenting on it at the same time. There are gigantic blood-red chapter markers: "TUESDAY MORNING", etc. Shyamalan breaks up the found footage with still shots of snowy ranks of trees, blazing sunsets, sunrise falling on a stack of logs. Mom packs the two kids off on a train for a visit. Her parents cut ties with her, but now they have reached out from their snowy isolated farm and want to know their grandchildren.
Mom has a brave demeanor, and funny, too, referring to her kids as "brats" but with mama-bear affection. She had two kids with this man who recently left them all for someone new.
"The Visit" starts quietly, with Mom ( Kathryn Hahn) talking to the camera about running away from home when she was 19: her parents disapproved of her boyfriend. Withhold visual information, lull the audience into safety, then turn the camera, and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT? But Shyamalan injects adrenaline into it, as well as a frank admission that, yes, it is a cliche, and yes, it is absurd that one would keep filming in moments of such terror, but he uses the main strength of found footage: we are trapped by the perspective of the person holding the camera. There are too many horror cliches to even list ("gotcha" scares, dark basements, frightened children, mysterious sounds at night, no cellphone reception), but the main cliche is that it is a "found footage" film, a style already wrung dry.