Big Picture Big Sound

To Grandmother's House We Go

The one-time wunderkind turned punchline, M. Night Shyamalan, makes a modest comeback with "The Visit", a low budget horror-comedy hybrid.

Shyamalan has had quite the interesting, if depressing, Hollywood trajectory. He broke out in 1999 with the hit "The Sixth Sense", a defining film in the ghost story genre. The movie found great success at the box office and was multi-Oscar nominated (including Picture, as well as writing and directing nominations for Shyamalan). "The Sixth Sense" gave Shyamalan the freedom to do anything he wanted and he followed-up that film with "Unbreakable" and "Signs", two terrific and richly layered thrillers.

But lightening didn't continue to strike for Shyamalan. In 2004, he did the woefully anti-climatic "The Village", followed by "The Lady in the Water" and "The Happening", which isn't good but not without its B-movie thrills. "The Last Airbender" and "After Earth" followed, bombed and were panned, and Hollywood and audiences had seem to have given up hope on the once promising auteur.

I wish "The Visit" were a grand reemergence for Shyamalan, a big welcome back party to great spooky filmmaking. While large portions of "The Visit" work, it's not the big return you may be hoping for. Shyamalan makes one massive and ultimately avoidable error with this movie. He isn't oblivious that his reputation has been tarnished, so he made a movie that employs the found footage conceit, a tactic that is used ad nauseam in modern horror filmmaking. It's distracting and often unnecessary but Shyamalan includes it here. My only guess is that he is trying to do what he thinks works and what audiences crave. It's a desperate case of pandering, not effective filmmaking.

"The Visit" finds a single mother (Kathryn Hahn), who has had a bit of a rough life. She is estranged from her parents after storming out in the heat of a big fight. Her husband left her and their two children, Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould). Mom - as she is listed in the credits - loves her kids but is clearly unhappy from the years that have gone by.

Thanks to the lovely Internet and that magical thing that connects us all called Facebook, Becca and Tyler's grandparents have reached out to their mom to try and reconnect and see their grandchildren. They just want to get to know them and work things out with their mother. They invite their grandchildren to spend a week with them and their mother agrees. Seems like a fishy plot contrivance to me.

Becca and Tyler want to film the entire trip for a documentary they are making, so we get to watch everything occur through their lens. I won't go any further with what happens at Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop's (Peter McRobbie) house but I'm sure you can imagine there isn't a lot of homemade cookies and watching TV way past your bedtime.

Shyamalan does create an eerie atmosphere at Nana and Pop Pop's, which helps keep "The Visit" a little on edge. The atmospheric tension is what will somewhat win you over with this film. But some of his plot choices throughout the screenplay are head scratchers - I just can't wrap my brain around Mom letting her kids go to her parents' house after not speaking to them for so long. And the shaky cam. Oh, the shaky cam!

Even so, Shyamalan has proved he can give us worse. But don't forget, he has proven he can give us much, much better.