The Visit review (trailer)

He has stumbled down the road with lesser successes, such as The Village, Signs and Unbreakable and his newest offering, The Visit, is also unlikely to make an impact on the horror circuit. The simple story involves 13-year-old Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) and his 15-year-old sister Becca (Olivia DeJonge) who are sent by their mother (Kathryn Hahn) to spend a week with their grandparents on a lonely farm in Pennsylvania.

But it doesn’t take long for the two youngsters to discover the elderly couple, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) are distinctly odd and covering up some dark secrets. Apart from a few randomly thrown in cheap scares, The Visit has little to offer and the manner in which director Shyamalan has chosen to frame his film is enough to cause sea sickness.

The story is told from Becca’s perspective because she is a film fan and wants to make a video of their trip. Using her hand-held camera, she records every moment of their visit. So we have plenty of interviews with the key characters, who are looking intensely at the camera and describing their lives.

The mother is introduced in the opening sequences, discussing her troubled relationship with her parents. The teenagers create a family documentary which, I imagine, they hope to post on the internet. It all sounds like fun and games for them until their grandparents begin to show their true colours.

It didn’t take long for me to work out the thrust of the narrative’s trajectory and as the plot unfolded, the whole affair became dark and messy. There were no surprises and for a horror film to grip, you need plenty of these along the way. The acting from the teenagers overshadows the adults, but fails lamentably to enhance the quality of the production.