What’s the worst film of 2015? There are still several months remaining, but right now, the leading candidate has got to be The Visit. It’s also a strong contender for another dubious distinction: it may end up being the most inane flick by an Oscar-nominated screenwriter/director released this decade or century, and if film remains a viable entity that far into the future, the entire millennium.
If I had seen The Visit without any prior knowledge, I would have assumed that it had been made by a preteen who aspired to become a filmmaker when he grew up. The screenplay is puerile and plagued by its overt absurdity. But in reality, The Visit was written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
In 1999 at age 29, Shyamalan became an international sensation for The Sixth Sense. Some naysayers cited the myriad conceptual errors in the work, but audiences were captivated by the film’s moodiness and denouement. Although The Sixth Sense was made on a budget of only $40 million, it grossed over $700 million worldwide. Shyamalan was hailed as a wunderkind.
Alas, in ensuing years, Shyamalan proved himself to be somewhat of a one-trick pony. He seemed reliant on the use of a twist ending often irreconcilable with the film’s antecedent text. His recent succession of films, Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth were all savaged by critics. Has Shyamalan totally lost his mojo?
Alas, The Visit constitutes yet a further fall from grace. To bring the film to fruition, Shyamalan was forced to self-finance it. Working with an estimated bare-bones budget of $5 million, the film is subverted by its meretricious production values. These complement a ludicrous narrative and incompetent direction.
Supposedly, Shyamalan has made multiple cuts of the film. One was a thriller and the other was a comedy, but rather than choosing between the two, Shyamalan cobbled together a final version—a bizarrely disconcerting admixture of the two. As a consequence, The Visit will leave audiences with a case of tonal whiplash.
The film invokes a backstory, which took place 15 years before. A young high school girl (Kathryn Hahn) eloped with one of her teachers. Her outraged parents reacted with unspeakable fury. Eventually, after having two children with her husband, the woman was abandoned by him. Now, she is eager to take a romantic Caribbean cruise with her new beau. So, while she’s vacationing, what will she do with her kids, budding documentarian Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and wannabe rapper Tyler (Ed Oxenbould)? Does it make any sense that the mother would send her children to stay at the remote Pennsylvania farmhouse of her estranged parents without even speaking to them? Bear in mind that they have never even met their grandparents, Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) and Nana (Deanna Dunagan). The two oldsters manifest behavior that becomes progressively strange. Are they just somewhat pixilated due to their advancing years, or is there something more troubling afoot?
All this is framed within the context of the “found footage” genre, a conceit that was innovative back in 1999 when The Blair Witch Project hit the big screen. Is Shyamalan so bereft of original ideas that he is now forced to recycle hackneyed tropes?
The Visit attempts to milk its central premise for both laughs and chills. It is an abject failure in both regards. The film is not merely inept. It is iconographically repugnant in its causal misogyny and its demeaning depiction of the frailties of old age. The Visit is epitomized by a vignette in which Gramps rubs a soiled diaper into his germophobic grandson’s face. It is an apt metaphor for what Shyamalan is doing to his audiences with this feculent film.
The Visit
1/2 *
Kathryn Hahn
Peter McRobbie
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
PG-13
