Everything about The Visit seems like a comment on, and possible parody of, M. Night Shyamalan's formula. You've got the way-too-smart-for-their-age kids with some serious emotional baggage in the form of two siblings sent to hang out with their estranged grandparents for a week. You've got the way-too-dumb-for-their-age adults completely emotionally absent to the damage of their children in the form of the siblings' mother, more focused on the cruise she can have with her new boyfriend than her children's concern that something's fishy with Nan and Pop. And you've got the larger-than-life possibly supernatural force that can clumsily serve as a metaphor, and elixir, to the emotional turmoil beset upon our protagonists in the form of the aforementioned grandparents, one of whom may be possessed by a demon, one of whom may be suicidal, both of whom are probably just old. What's the difference, then? What stops this from being like his first four films, or his last four films? Oddly enough, the answer is the same for both. The connective tissue between the real and the absurd kept his early work digestible in the same way that it highlighted the dopiness of his later work. Up until now, every one of his films have had tonal inconsistencies between scenes, but they've been mitigated by his adherence to aesthetic, his efforts to ensure you that these characters are simply just reacting to what's happening around them, coupled with his slow, meandering drip-feed of the insane. Don't forget it's a good hour before we even see an alien full-form in Signs, and even then it's blurry CRT footage. In The Visit, this connective tissue is gone entirely. The very first night of their stay, the two kids are told bedtime is 9.30pm. The older sibling sneaks out and, within seconds, sees her grandmother shuffling through the house, intermittently projectile-vomiting. The very next morning, the kids are playing hide and seek in the crawl space under the house, and with zero subtlety, the grandmother gets in on the game, shuffling way too fast for her age and being really vague of her intentions should she catch one of the kids. That night, they hear scratching outside their door, and open it to find their grandmother naked and furiously running her nails up and down the wallpaper. The shit has well and truly hit the fan, but we've still got an hour and change to go. On top of that, the kids have all but forgotten about it the next day, focusing more on how bored they are, and the different ways they can play with each other's emotions the way only siblings can. There's artistic merit to the notion that this is meant to highlight a likely realistic turn of events should actual children find themselves in a situation similar to this, but I like to think it's instead a comment from M. Night on the perilous threads his films have walked, something that comes in useful when the film takes the idea of putting the shit to the fan early on so it can descend into full-blown actual insanity come the third act. Because there's nothing more freeing than staring down that perilous thread and jumping straight off.
It's possible that I'm reading too far into this. It's kind of what I do. But I genuinely think there's something here. You don't reach the dizzying levels of inexplicable craziness that this film does without being somewhat self-aware. You don't have two kids being held hostage and forced to play Yahtzee, one of the hostage takers feverishly eating cookies while the other is quietly literally shitting himself, followed by one of the kids being locked in a room with an old woman who crawls along the ground and occasionally makes a screeching sound while the other kid freezes in the face of danger just-like-he-did-at-the-football-game-which-is-why-Dad-left and has his face smeared in old man shit while the old man posits cryptic dialogue about his grand divinity amongst worthless humanity, followed by the kid trapped in the room cutting the old woman's throat with a piece of glass while the other kid snaps out of his freeze, and crushes the man's head repeatedly in the fridge door while screaming commentator's dialogue from the aforementioned football game, followed by the most saccharine that saccharine can get scene between a mother and daughter about not holding onto rage which is totally why she didn't realise earlier on that the kid's grandparents were actually murderous crazies from the local asylum, followed by a three and a half minute freestyle rap over the credits from the boy who had shit on his face about having shit on his face, and Mel Gibson, without some degree of transparency. It even seems like one big goof to make it a found-footage horror film. Whether M. Night's artistic decision, or strain from a studio, it's certainly satiric in its delivery. Poor shaky-cam cinematography here is anaesthetised and in a way improved by making the cinematographer a budding documentarian, so naturally, she wants the shots to be good, but is still limited to her meager understanding of the craft. It's genuinely impressive. There's also the question in every found-footage horror film of who the fuck edited this together. The Visit's answer is, "The documentarian, of course!" Seriously, in spite of the turn of events I just vomited into this paragraph, the film ends with title cards written by the girl documenting her editing process. M. Night Shyamalan isn't asking you to question whether he knew it'd be a bit weird to say that someone who found her dead grandparent's rotting bodies in a dumpster would still want to make the film she set out to make, he's asking you to identify with the inherent absurdity of this sort of film, and of his films in general, and to laugh at it. And make no mistake, this film is funny. Having said that, is it enjoyable? That's kind of an irrelevant question, in my opinion. "Is it interesting?" is the more pressing question, and the answer is "Yes", if for no other reason than to see someone who was a cultural icon at one point, who has since slipped into a mixture of obscurity and incompetency, hold up a mirror to himself and his legacy with a smile on his face. A big, shit-eating grin. You're welcome.
