Ten years ago, M. Night Shyamalan was coming off such an extraordinary cold streak that a small-scale, found-footage thriller seemed like a major retreat. Instead, it wound up jumpstarting an improbable comeback that’s still going today.
Shyamalan’s films still aren’t for everyone, and seem unlikely to reach Sixth Sense-level blockbuster status again anytime soon. But as seen in a recent retrospective at no less than Lincoln Center in New York, his work has clawed back an appreciative audience who glories in the likes of Trap or Knock at the Cabin. It’s a far cry from nearly being able to pinpoint the moment audiences decisively turned on the confident and distinctive genre filmmaker. It arguably happened about three-quarters of the way through 2004’s The Village, his spooky mystery with a trademark twist that seemed to annoy more people than it delighted (as evidenced by a then-massive 68% second-weekend drop).
From there, Shyamalan made the flop fantasy Lady in the Water; the widely derided Mark Wahlberg-versus-plants horror movie The Happening; a fully reviled adaptation of a Nickelodeon cartoon, catching the ire of countless Avatar: The Last Airbender fans in the process; and capped it off by signaling a newly mortal phase of Will Smith’s once-invincible career with After Earth. That some of these movies were actually financially successful — The Happening opened largely on the promise of R-rated Shyamalan horror, while The Last Airbender remains one of his biggest global grossers — somehow made things worse, ensuring that his failures were particularly public.
The Visit, by contrast, initially looked more like a for-hire job: a found-footage horror movie at a time when public interest in the format seemed to be waning. (A sixth Paranormal Activity was imminent.) It seemed like a particularly awkward fit for Shyamalan, who favors exacting visual compositions and deliberate pacing. Maybe he was throwing up his hands and surrendering to cheap indifference, matching the antipathy so many felt for so much of his later work.
In retrospect, though, it seems obvious that The Visit is right in Shyamalan’s wheelhouse (even setting aside the fact it marked the point where he started self-financing his movies and, as such, avoiding outside creative interference). Kids figure into the majority of his work, and The Visit uses the found-footage conceit to stick to the vantage of teenage Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) as they spend the week with their estranged grandparents Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie). The elderly couple had a major falling out with their daughter Loretta (Kathryn Hahn), and haven’t been in her life. Now, they’ve reached out and invited her children for a visit, hoping to reconcile. Becca, an aspiring filmmaker, wants to make a documentary about the process. Instead, she encounters stranger, more menacing behavior from her grandparents, particularly under cover of night. Nana and Pop Pop dismiss each other’s behavior as typical pitfalls of aging, as the kids become increasingly convinced something else is going on.
Becca’s interest in filmmaking is a masterstroke from Shyamalan. It both winks at the intentionally rough and amateurish camerawork of most found-footage films — Becca is nerdily attuned to the principles of good filmmaking — while still allowing for Shyamalan to loosen up and use techniques that seem at odds with his usual style. The tell that Shyamalan isn’t just running around with a typical shakycam is his collaboration with veteran cinematographer Maryse Alberti; she previously worked with Todd Haynes, Darren Aronofsky, and Todd Solondz, and had Creed out the same year as The Visit. Sometimes, she and Shyamalan will arrange a shot of striking beauty, like Becca’s capturing of her grandparents looking distorted through a glass prism. And sometimes, they’ll playfully fix the camera in a location that, as Becca says, “forces us to imagine what’s beyond the frame,” not quite realizing she’s talking about the effectiveness of horror movies in particular.
By bringing some playfully obvious intentionality back to found footage, Shyamalan also pays tribute of sorts to a movie that shared multiplexes with his Sixth Sense back in 1999. In July of that year, The Blair Witch Project became an unexpected smash, emphasizing a creepy verisimilitude in its story of amateur filmmakers lost in the haunted woods. It got great buzz and also flummoxed some audiences, put off by this new way of telling a horror story. The Sixth Sense, with its more classical approach, arrived a few weeks later and wound up eclipsing Blair Witch at the box office, in the popular imagination, and all the way to the Academy Awards. When the climax of The Visit cuts between a static shot of Tyler frozen in terror and handheld pandemonium as Becca runs around her grandparents’ home, it feels like a tribute to several touchstone images from Blair Witch, confirming the latter’s canonization as Shyamalan tries out his own spin. The whole movie — which includes footage from two different cameras, edited together, without the usual found-footage rigamarole of avoiding opening credits — rides a line between Shyamalan’s formal discipline and his sillier, sometimes slapdash side. (Classic Shyamalan first-draft-y writing: using onscreen subtitles to count down the week by redundantly specifying “Tuesday morning,” “Wednesday morning,” and so on, rather than just using the days on their own.)
The Visit also anticipated Shyamalan’s next decade of largely homegrown (and often domestically oriented) hits. His genre movies have often imitated the simple hookiness of a Twilight Zone episode or an installment of a horror anthology, but that framework fully solidifies with The Visit. As such, the movie sometimes feels a little drawn out, even at a trim 94 minutes. It’s moved along by the humor Shyamalan teases out from Becca’s dorky formality and Tyler’s bravado at freestyle rapping, retroactively confirming that, yes, many of his past movies were being funny on purpose; he’s just got a delightfully corny sense of Dad Humor, alongside a genuine understanding of how weird kids can be. The Visit isn’t his richest text about the intricacies of familial love, but it does, on Becca’s terms, force the audience to think about what’s beyond the frame. In this case, it’s invisible family connections and what can or should fray them. Thematically, The Visit feels of a piece with his more affecting later work like Old and Trap.
Appropriate for an awkward family reunion, The Visit also engages in a savvy adjustment of expectations, as Shyamalan undermines some tenets of his work (that hushed sense of melancholy), reinforces others (he really is funny), and sometimes gives in to what audiences expect of him. After years of having plot turns incorrectly described as “twists” that didn’t live up to Sixth Sense, he springs a genuine twist at the end of this one. The bigger eventual revelation, though, was Shyamalan settling in for the long haul, ready to continue putting his stamp on creepy chamber pieces for another decade and beyond.
