M. Night Shyamalan’s career had stumbled and faltered. After the astounding success of The Sixth Sense, he did the movie Unbreakable, which is well-remembered today but quite a letdown from the previous movie at the time. Signs was in so many ways a good film and yet it has that whole “the aliens can’t stand water” thing. (Have you ever walked through a cornfield? Corn is wet.)
And from there, his last acceptable movie, The Village, which a lot of people like but it’s a bunch of malarkey. Then a string of progressively disappointing disasters: Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth…with those last two being a shocking amount of money to give to a director on a downward slide.
After directing an episode of the TV show Wayward Pines, he realized how bloated his productions had become. TV forced him to work quickly and efficiently. Following that, he made The Visit in 2015 in under 30 days for only $5 million.
And it’s good. M. Night Shyamalan made a movie better than his previous 4 put together. Not a great movie, but surprisingly good at being the horror movie that it intends to be, and if you didn’t know that it was M. Night Shyamalan (so you either have massively high expectations or you’re just waiting to pronounce it another disaster) you’d say it was better than most modern horror productions, though that is a low bar. (Looking at you, Paranormal Activity series!)
“Those are nice granite countertops.” 
*slam!*
Kathryn Hahn (the only star in the movie, and she probably did her part in an afternoon) is a single mom sending her 14-year-old aspiring filmmaker daughter and her rapping 8-year-old son off to stay with her grandparents. She hasn’t seen her parents since she ran away when she got pregnant, so this is the first time her parents have even met her kids.
It’s an uncomfortable situation made even worse by how strange the grandparents are. Suspicions get raised quicker than you can say, “I need you to crawl inside the oven and clean it.” The kids have to be in their room by 9:30 with their door locked because grandma has a condition that causes her to wander the halls babbling and moaning and vomiting. A game of hide-and-seek under the porch seems more like Theseus running from the minotaur. And then there’s the way gam-gam immediately gets oven cleaner on their laptop’s camera though not anywhere else on the computer, which is obviously fishy.
Is there a twist in this movie? Not really. There’s a twist in The Sixth Sense, and kind of one in The Village. (I’ll tell you an anecdote about that at the end.) But most of Shyamalan’s movies don’t have twists, unless you’re so eager for a twist that you count regular story progression. Mr. Glass is the bad guy. Everything happens for a reason, even your son having asthma. Plants don’t like your face. These aren’t really twists, they’re developments. But you know something’s weird about these grandparents. That’s the whole movie.
My only complaint about this film is the “found footage”-y method of making it. I suppose it’s Shyamalan’s way of recording digitally to avoid how lush and beautiful his films usually look, but the amateur shakeycam thing is so over. Found footage is not only tired, it exhausted itself years ago and is just back after a long nap, but it needs to sleep. Or be put to sleep. Oddly enough, with GoPros mounted to helmets and clothing and such, and cops wearing bodycams, a found footage video would make much more sense today, but we’ve yet to see that. Instead, as with Cloverfield and the like, it’s always someone wielding a handheld video camera, and we accept that these people are shooting video even at times where it makes no sense that they retain that much control of the camera.
Okay, end of review. I promised you an anecdote.
Like I said, everyone is expecting M. Night Shyamalan movies to have a twist. For those of you who haven’t seen The Village, it takes place in a pioneer community sometime in the 1800s, though their village is surrounded by a forest that is inhabited by monsters. Throughout the film, the elders of the village relate how they had moved there from “the cities” where crime was rampant. Every elder has the story of having lost someone due to a murder. At one point, a young man is injured, and they consider allowing a blind girl to venture off to the cities to retrieve some medicines. The elders gather in private, and they go to open a box that we have seen before. The teen-age girls in front of us at the theater whispered, “It’s a cell phone.”
Which actually might have been better. It turns out to be a collection of photographs and newspaper clippings of people from the 1970s and 80s, revealing the truth that this takes place in modern times. I can’t recall why it’s even necessary to open the box other than to reveal this. A cell phone would have done the same thing and been a more shocking payoff.
