Director: M. Night Shyamalan
Writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Cast: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn
Runtime: 94 mins.
2015
This is truly a momentous day.
M. Night Shyamalan has made a new movie. Already this sounds like a very bad idea. I don't like to dogpile on easy targets, but I feel uniquely qualified to do so in this case. M. Night Shyamalan was my first ever favorite director. In the budding years of my cinephilia, I discovered the value of choosing a "favorite director" at the same time I was discovering Shyamalan's body of work. The Village was the first scary movie I'd ever seen, and the shocking moments of blood red imagery are still imprinted on my memory. From there I worked through The Sixth Sense, Signs, and Unbreakable, and I loved them all. Shyamalan's deliberate pacing, eye for the unsettling, and twisty plots all had significant appeal to my adolescent brain.
Then came the downfall. I eagerly awaited Lady in the Water, only to be a bit baffled and disappointed by the circlejerking peculiarity of the narrative. After that The Happening was announced. M. Night finally makes an R-rated horror movie! It's about mass suicide! My interest was piqued and I was rooting for it so hard.
We all know how that story goes.
The Last Airbender happened and I skipped it. Shyamalan's career had been ground into feeble dust. At one point they didn't even let him work on his own movies anymore; Devil was advertised as "from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan." That movie was rubbish too.
Several years and one After Earth later, my love affair with Shyamalan is long dead and buried, never to rise again.
Then along come the trailers for The Visit, written and directed by M. Night "They Still Let Him Use a Camera?" Shyamalan. Here are all the reasons the trailer looks horrible:
-Shyamalan
-found footage
-cartoonish acting
-contrived scenarios
-scenes of characters talking on skype
-found footage
-know-it-all adolescent female protagonist with unrealistic vocabulary
-douchebag adolescent rapper male protagonist
-Shyamalan
-found footage
-found footage
Given that severe cocktail of conceptual wrongheadedness, one could only expect Shyamalan to somehow comically bottom himself with a new career lowlight.
And yet...
I kid you not, and this surprises me more than anyone, but...
The Visit is really good.
To communicate why and how this happened, I'll go through and refute all of my above surface-level complaints in reverse order.
douchebag adolescent rapper male protagonist
The Visit tells the story of a brother and sister (roughly fifteen and twelve I believe?) who take a trip to see their heretofore estranged grandparents while their mother takes a well-earned vacation with a guy named Miguel. Tyler is the younger sibling, the doofus, the goof-off. While his sister is applying herself to intellectual pursuits, Tyler brags about being "on the text" with two separate girls, and spouts freestyle raps that he is incredibly proud of.
So we come to the first unanticipated merit of The Visit. It's funny.
Somehow Shyamalan manages to make the above abomination of a character description endearing and entertaining. That "somehow" is by crafting an actual character. Tyler doesn't do anything just to be annoying or cool. He's trying to forge a connection with his sister, and make an impact on a seemingly apathetic world, in the only ways he knows how. Ever since his father abandoned the family for a new woman and fewer responsibilities, Tyler has had issues with germophobia. When we take this vulnerability into account, we begin to see all the ways that Tyler's fronts are tools that he uses to shield his own weakness and fear.
Plus his jokes are legitimately funny, and Ed Oxenbould plays him with an immense dose of humor and humanity. I would listen to an album of this doofy lispy freestyling kid.
know-it-all adolescent female protagonist with unrealistic vocabulary
The beauty of the child protagonists in The Visit is that their characters unravel so organically. We might get a window into Tyler's soul first because he spends more time in front of the camera, but wannabe documentarist Becca is no less layered because of it.
Becca is a brilliant pretentious little aspiring filmmaker who wants to craft a documentary about her family, her estranged grandparents, and the week during which the two will unite. Much of the movie is getting to see the process of creation--how the film we are watching came about both pragmatically and conceptually. Making Becca a filmmaker is a stroke of absolute genius on Shyamalan's parts because it's a perfect workaround for some of the major problems of found footage, which I will talk about below. But it also makes sense on a character level. In the same way that Tyler hides his hurt behind charisma and bombast, Becca buries hers beneath intellect and lenses. Her big words are overcompensation, her projects a desperate attempt to prove her worth. So many specters swirl unspoken around her documentary, and I'm not even talking about the scary movie kind.
The documentary-making conceit is also great because it allows us to see the rich relationship between the two siblings. It's not like most found footage, where one character loves filming stuff and everyone else ignores or yells at her. In this case the movie is a collaborative effort. ("So I get to be Assistant Director?" Tyler asks. "I was thinking more like B Camera Operator," Becca responds.) The kids help each other and mistreat each other in equal measure, but the love is always there. As such, this might be one of the most convincing young sibling relationships I've ever seen play out onscreen.
scenes of characters talking on skype
Normally this sort of thing brings a movie to a dead screeching halt, both visually and plotwise. Skype sessions are typically used for information dumps, and aren't very interesting. Not so with The Visit. For one thing, the kids are isolated and skype is their only small window into the outside world. For another, the documentary conceit means there's a lot of neat play with frames within frames--someone filming someone looking at a computer screen with previously filmed footage on it, etc. Shyamalan plays some cool mise en scene games to keep the screen and cameraplay fresh.
contrived scenarios
It's horror, get over it.
Seriously though, the trailers made the situations look a whole lot worse than they actually play. The plot has some terrific pacing--just enough weirdness to keep us constantly creeped out, but not enough to make it unbelievable that the kids stick around. Take the above shot from a nightmarish crawlspace. Why would you ever go in there??? For three reasons.
1. It's broad daylight.
2. Their mother told them stories about her old hide and seek space that they wanted to discover for the documentary.
3. They're kids who wanted to play hide and seek.
It all checks out, and the setpiece totally works.
cartoonish acting
Speaking of the plausibility of the kids sticking around, I should mention that the movie's humor is a big part of this. Half the time something screwed up happens, it's immediately undercut by a joke. This works on a character level, as two kids try desperately to cope with a situation and an age demographic they don't understand. It also enhances the plausibility of the film as a whole. If the kids see Nana buck naked and scratching at the walls in the middle of the night, and they scream bloody murder? They're done, there's no reason for them to stick around. But if they see that, shut the door, and Tyler says, "Oh my god I'm blind."? We feel like they've just been privy to some weird thing old people do, and that it makes them very uncomfortable. Not reason enough to flee the house in fear.
I bring this up under the category of acting because these scenes of tonal juggling are incredibly difficult to pull off, and can only really be landed if the performers are on board. This movie doesn't have a single Wahlbergian What?? Nooo!!!!! moment; its child performers are super gifted, and they sell the comedy, fear, and drama, sometimes all at once. I'm a sucker for superb child performances, so I'll be keeping both these kids on my radar.
Nana and Pop Pop aren't slouches either. They're not as dynamic or relatable as the kids (it would wholly defeat the purpose of the film if they were), but their performances walk a crazy tightwire between quaint and utterly terrifying. The careful ambiguity of their actions sells the longevity of the runtime more than anything.
found footage
I've written a bit before about the found footage phenomenon, and I decided that for found footage to work, the camera needs to be treated like a character. That is certainly the case here; if not the camera, then certainly the documentary is a character built from the collective input of a family, their memories, and their horrendous experiences. The documentary as a whole has character growth, even as the individual protagonists' growth are embedded within it. The documentary is used as a tool, a weapon, an excuse, and a plot device. The documentary entices and influences the protagonists to act in ways they otherwise wouldn't. It's fully fleshed out and totally dynamic.
Earlier I mentioned how Shyamalan uses Becca's character as a workaround for typical found footage shortcomings. I'm thinking especially of the tendency for filmmakers to use found footage as an excuse to avoid compelling mise en scene.* That term just means everything that's in the camera frame, but great filmmakers are painstakingly precise about it. Found footage filmmakers often ignore it for the sake of some idiot version of "realism." But here, Becca is a filmmaker, one who has read up on formalism and studied all the principles found footage directors ignore. Thus is makes total sense that The Visit looks a great deal better than 99% of found footage films out there. Not only that, but we get to hear Becca discuss technique with Tyler; scene composition becomes a representation of character in a neat way. None of it feels pretentious or gimmicky. We get to witness a raw young talent try to channel her emotion into images. It totally works.
*Shyamalan actually refuses the label of found footage, instead preferring to call The Visit a "documentary-style film," the difference being that documentary style has cinematic intent whereas found footage doesn't. He's making the same claim I am, though what he's calling a qualitative difference in category I'm calling a quantitative difference in concept.
Shyamalan
How could you do this, Shyamalan? You've pulled off the greatest twist of all: making your career worth paying attention to again.
To be clear, when Shyamalan's career took a downturn, it wasn't because he lost all talent as a director. It's because his screenplays burrowed so far up into his own ass that they got lost there, never to return. He's always been a strong director of visuals (until, maybe, the utter collapse of The Last Airbender).
Shyamalan's screenplays have often had a slight reek of superiority. Bet you didn't see that one coming! they shriek with twisted glee. It worked for a while, but Shyamalan got into a rut of expectations. He became the twist guy, and people both disdained that about him and expected more. He wrote himself into a hole.
And with The Visit, I believe he wrote himself back out. He doesn't even cameo! The Visit is scary, funny, charming, dramatic, and emotionally satisfying. I will not lie, the ending had me near tears. Some of you will watch this movie and wonder what the hell is wrong with me, but if you connect with the characters--and I absolutely did--the movie has a great payoff.
All it took was for Shyamalan to get back to basics: good old-fashioned character-based fiction. That's how stories began. That's how stories will end. The Visit appeals to something deeply human within us, and in doing so leaves all ancillary expectations and pretensions behind.
3.5 / 5 BLOBS
No comments:
Post a Comment