M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 film The Visit has claimed the top spot on streaming charts just days after premiering on Max. This can only mean that people who have never seen this movie are finally discovering what we have known for years: it’s one of Shyamalan’s best and scariest films ever!
That newfound surge of appreciation is no mean feat, especially considering that The Visit contains zero supernatural elements. It’s just not that kind of movie. It’s about real life, specifically growing old, which is scary enough on its own.
For a while in the mid-2010s it seemed like M. Night Shyamalan was a bit of a one-hit wonder. After the massive success of his first major film, The Sixth Sense, he failed to produce the same compelling stories and characters in his follow-up films (except for Signs, which I’ll always think is scary despite the presence of Mel Gibson and an admittedly schmaltzy subplot). After The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth tanked, our expectations for his next original film, The Visit, were pretty low.
Even Shyamalan knew he was skating on thin ice, telling Rolling Stone in 2015, “I felt like was I starting to lose my voice a bit.” Thankfully for us, he’s not the quitting type. He started working on a new story idea tentatively called Sundowning, the term for when people suffering from dementia get confused at the end of the day. With no studio support, the writer-director shelled out $5 million from the equity in his own home to make the movie, then faced countless rejections from potential distributors before finally landing a deal. The movie went on to earn $98 million!
The Visit stars Olivia DeJonge as Becca and Ed Oxenbould as her brother, Tyler. (The two would reunite the following year for the fantastic Christmas horror movie Better Watch Out.) The kids are sent to stay with their Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) on a Pennsylvania farm. Oddly, they’ve never met their grandparents before because their mother Loretta (Kathryn Hahn) left home 15 years ago and never returned. In a generational parallel, Becca harbors resentment toward her father and hasn’t spoken to him since the parents’ divorce. This bad blood introduces a central theme of the film: holding grudges, and the importance of forgiveness.
Loretta arranges for her kids to stay with her parents while she takes a vacation with her new boyfriend. It’s meant to be a sort of soft reconciliation, but it sets up a twist that few viewers ever see coming.
In spite of the kids joking about being surrounded by old people, Shyamalan manages to set an eerie tone from the start. The whole movie is filmed as “found-footage” captured by the kids’ camcorder as they make a “documentary” about their visit with the new grandparents. Having no musical soundtrack adds a certain creepy realism, reminding us of found-footage films like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity.
The kids soon realize that Nana and Pop Pop go totally haywire after dark. While sneaking out of their rooms at night, they witness Nana becoming increasingly unhinged, and these nighttime freakouts are some of the most nerve-racking moments in cinema. Things aren’t much better during the day; there’s a scene in which Nana tries her hardest to coax Becca into the oven that gives major witch-meets-Hansel and Gretel vibes, and the hide-and-seek scene in the crawl space underneath the house will literally haunt our dreams. Seriously.
Spoiler alert! Don’t read below if you don’t want to know the twist!
The action escalates with Shyamalan slyly revealing more shocking moments, culminating in a video chat with Loretta that reveals that … dun dun duuuunnnn … those are not her parents! They’re complete strangers masquerading as Nana and Pop Pop! This fact becomes apparent when Tyler discovers uniforms from a nearby psychiatric ward stashed in the basement (along with the real Nana and Pop Pop … or what’s left of them), proving the imposters are actually patients who escaped from a nearby mental health facility. The kids have to fight to the death to get away from the faux grandparents’ grip while Loretta races to get to them.
At the end of The Visit, Loretta laments never getting back in touch with her parents before their deaths and encourages her kids to reconnect with their estranged father. It’s never too late to forgive and forget and let people know you love them. After all, you never know when an escaped lunatic will slip into their home, murder them, and impersonate them. Hey, it could happen … that’s why it’s so scary!
Later in his career, Shyamalan will make another movie about how terrifying it is to get Old, but the twist in that film was so far-fetched it fails to hit the mark quite like The Visit. Perhaps it’s the documentary style of The Visit that lends a realism that Old simply could not match. The twist in The Visit could also really happen, whereas the reveal in Old is ludicrous (I won’t spoil that one for you).
Realism is at the heart of why The Visit is lighting up streaming charts at the moment. Getting old is scary—almost as scary as watching the people we love get older. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go call my mom.
The Visit is now streaming on Max.
(featured image: Universal Pictures)
