M Night Shyamalan has been having a very bad row of movies recently... not only have they been box office bombs but movie goers and critics seem to unable to give this guy a break; In my humble opinion M Night is a very talented filmmaker and he has more than proven his worth with films like "Unbreakable" and the "Sixth Sense" but after "Signs" his subsequent movies haven't really been able to live up to them by turning out so bad.
At this point Shyamalan is a legend because of being a great filmmaker turned bad, "The Visit" looked like a return to form for M Night, however I never got around to watch it on theaters... despite some of the good reception the movie, Adam from the YouTube channel YourMovieSucksDOTorg, released a lengthy quickie about how bad the movie was and because I usually trust his judgement I decided to not pay money in theaters to see it but a part of little me was still curious about the film, eventually I got around to watch it recently and... meh...
The story fallows two siblings (an older sister and a younger brother) to visit their grandparents whom they have never met but they seem to act very weird particularly at night, so the sibling are not only trying to co-exist with their grandparents but also figure out why they act so weird.
The story is nothing really special but the problems with the movie are very clear to me... the elements they try to focus on are complete and outer pointless, not enough is done to develop the characters instead they are just given traits and use very lazy exposition dialogue to bring up "context"; therefore the main characters rarely do anything, and that's because there is no conflict... but it's ok because we are just gonna have the main characters act stupid and unreasonable to have conflict.
Not only are there many cringe moments in the movie but the scary parts are nothing but cheap jump scares, shame because I actually thought M Night was one o the few people I thought got this right... but apparently I was wrong, Instead of having fear be developed has a context through the story and having feel that sensation along with the main characters they squandered it into lazy jump scares. I know fear is subjective to each individual (some people are just more scary cats than others and that totally fine) but sadly that has turn horror movies into a "hit or miss" target audience because horror movie goers who are easily straddled by jump scares are going to be satisfied while others just won't.
Lastly there is the cinematography; I usually don't give much importance to it when reviewing a movie since my philosophy is that common viewers won't really care about this unless you know about filmmaking or care about that stuff at all, but for this film it must be talked about... because the eldest sister is an aspiring documentarist the whole movie is shoot has a "found footage" and this is getting tiring in horror films but that is not why I think this is a lazy gimmick, I think it's lazy because it's being used has a clutch to make weird shots seem intentional. It seems to me that Shyamalan is doing this because his latest attempts to have people notice his camera compositions have back fired horribly so instead he just decided to have the kids shoot the whole thing... and I wouldn't be bitching about this if it weren't that the entire quality of the image in film says other wise, was nobody really taken aback by how high quality was the Skype calls? the way the camera moves is not like that of a common hold hand shot.
The Visit is bad but is not the worst M Night Shyamalan has put out, I still think After Earth is much worst but I think the choices made here were the real problem, they should have shoot the movie like any other and built the horror elements through context instead of lazy jump scares... Hopefully M Night's next movie can really turn him around.
