The Visit is good, especially for a found footage movie (though it isn’t good enough to make any fresh argument for the genre). But The Visit is not good because it has adequate children leads; both raves and attacks on Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould feel out-of-place. Nor is The Visit loaded with tense sequences worthy of Hitchcock. Only a short hide-and-go-seek scene rakes the nerves for any real length of time. Instead The Visit succeeds through a clever structural trick, one that relies utterly on M. Night Shyamalan’s most mocked qualities as a filmmaker, repurposed to great effect.

The Visit Movie Review

Taxonomy destroys horror. After The Wolf Man a clinical description of the monster arises. Silver bullets, gypsies, and full moons become attributes and rules rather than zones of dread. Minor variations in the werewolf formula are reduced to speciation, quickly shepherded from a zone of horror to a set of tidy boxes demarcating slight werewolf variations. Even when something genuinely new comes along it quickly becomes victim of those same trends. Freddy Krueger becomes the sweater, the hat, and the mean quips (“Welcome to my world, bitch!”).

Movie mythology places a similar drain on a horror movie’s vitality and feeling of dread. While actual mythology is a vague cultural collection shaped by our collective morality, history, and customs, horror movie mythology tends to be a shuffling, sprawling, misguided effort to plug in the dark holes where the actual dread resides. Prioritizing mythology gives us garbage ideas like “let’s explain Jason’s background and how he keeps coming back.”

So what you have is a horror movie environment that too often has its expectations set in advance. Ghosts, demonic possession, zombies, serial killers, and aliens all have rules that we know going in. Even innovative stuff, like It Follows, focuses first on “the rules,” removing the dread of the unknown from its toolkit up front.

The Visit isn’t as accomplished as It Follows, but has received surprisingly positive reception because it accomplishes horror in a rare way.

This is all a long way of saying that The Visit succeeds by blowing a big bubble where taxonomy and mythology aren’t welcome, at least for a bit. Instead, M. Night Shyamalan has created a movie where anything goes… at least for a time. Pop Pop and Nana can stare into wells, run about on all fours, scratch walls, and creep on kids, and nothing they do is forced to fit in some grand design. Instead Shyamalan uses this realm of non-explanation to build dread and focus on horror. And while The Visit feels at least bound by the natural human world, even this is thrown out late in the movie, as monsters are introduced (don’t worry, this isn’t the spoiler you think it is). This makes The Visit surprisingly effective.

Since this is a Western movie and eschews J-Horror inexactness, a pat answer eventually falls into place. And yes, you could maybe condemn the eventual reveal as a Shyamalan-esque twist. But doing so is a misunderstanding of what is achieved and it’s purpose in the movie. The twist is not the crux of The Visit. Instead it’s nothing more than an exit strategy, providing a clever way out of a pile of clues that add up to nothing. Shyamalan uses the twist to avoid turning The Visit away from horror until the very last.

Shyamalan proves horror is his true strength by taking away any frame of reference we would typically expect. Instead, we are left with two old people acting as scary as possible, with no adherence to any rule beyond the limits of the human body. Shyamalan even takes a swipe at horror movie mythology as we usually imagine it, giving us an infodump that retools the entire plot of Lady in the Water to great effect in a chilling monologue. Rather than giving us info that fills in a map, The Visit sticks to fear, in all its horrible uncertainty.