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The Visit provides horror fans with a satisfying blend of thrills and laughs -- and also signals a welcome return to form for writer-director M. Night Shyamalan.

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M. Night Shyamalan

Olivia DeJonge

Ed Oxenbould

Deanna Dunagan

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M. Night Shyamalan had his heyday almost 20 years ago. He leapt out of the gate with such confidence he became a champion instantly. And then...something went awry. He became embarrassingly self-serious, his films drowning in pretension and strained allegories. His famous twists felt like a director attempting to re-create the triumph of " The Sixth Sense ," where the twist of the film was so successfully withheld from audiences that people went back to see the film again and again. But now, here comes " The Visit ," a film so purely entertaining that you almost forget how scary it is. With all its terror, "The Visit" is an extremely funny film. 

There are too many horror cliches to even list ("gotcha" scares, dark basements, frightened children, mysterious sounds at night, no cellphone reception), but the main cliche is that it is a "found footage" film, a style already wrung dry. But Shyamalan injects adrenaline into it, as well as a frank admission that, yes, it is a cliche, and yes, it is absurd that one would keep filming in moments of such terror, but he uses the main strength of found footage: we are trapped by the perspective of the person holding the camera. Withhold visual information, lull the audience into safety, then turn the camera, and OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT? 

"The Visit" starts quietly, with Mom ( Kathryn Hahn ) talking to the camera about running away from home when she was 19: her parents disapproved of her boyfriend. She had two kids with this man who recently left them all for someone new. Mom has a brave demeanor, and funny, too, referring to her kids as "brats" but with mama-bear affection. Her parents cut ties with her, but now they have reached out  from their snowy isolated farm and want to know their grandchildren. Mom packs the two kids off on a train for a visit.

Shyamalan breaks up the found footage with still shots of snowy ranks of trees, blazing sunsets, sunrise falling on a stack of logs. There are gigantic blood-red chapter markers: "TUESDAY MORNING", etc. These choices launch us into the overblown operatic horror style while commenting on it at the same time. It ratchets up the dread.

Becca ( Olivia DeJonge ) and Tyler ( Ed Oxenbould ) want to make a film about their mother's lost childhood home, a place they know well from all of her stories. Becca has done her homework about film-making, and instructs her younger brother about "frames" and "mise-en-scène." Tyler, an appealing gregarious kid, keeps stealing the camera to film the inside of his mouth and his improvised raps. Becca sternly reminds him to focus. 

The kids are happy to meet their grandparents. They are worried about the effect their grandparents' rejection had on their mother (similar to Cole's worry about his mother's unfinished business with her own parent in "The Sixth Sense"). Becca uses a fairy-tale word to explain what she wants their film to do — it will be an "elixir" to bring home to Mom. 

Nana ( Deanna Dunagan ), at first glance, is a Grandma out of a storybook, with a grey bun, an apron, and muffins coming out of the oven every hour. Pop Pop ( Peter McRobbie ) is a taciturn farmer who reminds the kids constantly that he and Nana are "old." 

But almost immediately, things get crazy. What is Pop Pop doing out in the barn all the time? Why does Nana ask Becca to clean the oven, insisting that she crawl all the way in ? What are those weird sounds at night from outside their bedroom door? They have a couple of Skype calls with Mom, and she reassures them their grandparents are "weird" but they're also old, and old people are sometimes cranky, sometimes paranoid. 

As the weirdness intensifies, Becca and Tyler's film evolves from an origin-story documentary to a mystery-solving investigation. They sneak the camera into the barn, underneath the house, they place it on a cabinet in the living room overnight, hoping to get a glimpse of what happens downstairs after they go to bed. What they see is more than they (and we) bargained for.

Dunagan and McRobbie play their roles with a melodramatic relish, entering into the fairy-tale world of the film. And the kids are great, funny and distinct. Tyler informs his sister that he wants to stop swearing so much, and instead will say the names of female pop singers. The joke is one that never gets old. He falls, and screams, "Sarah McLachlan!" When terrified, he whispers to himself, " Katy Perry ... " Tyler, filming his sister, asks her why she never looks in the mirror. "Your sweater is on backwards." As he grills her, he zooms in on her, keeping her face off-center, blurry grey-trunked trees filling most of the screen. The blur is the mystery around them. Cinematographer Maryse Alberti creates the illusion that the film is being made by kids, but also avoids the nauseating hand-held stuff that dogs the found-footage style.

When the twist comes, and you knew it was coming because Shyamalan is the director, it legitimately shocks. Maybe not as much as "The Sixth Sense" twist, but it is damn close. (The audience I saw it with gasped and some people screamed in terror.) There are references to " Halloween ", "Psycho" (Nana in a rocking chair seen from behind), and, of course, " Paranormal Activity "; the kids have seen a lot of movies, understand the tropes and try to recreate them themselves. 

"The Visit" represents Shyamalan cutting loose, lightening up, reveling in the improvisational behavior of the kids, their jokes, their bickering, their closeness. Horror is very close to comedy. Screams of terror often dissolve into hysterical laughter, and he uses that emotional dovetail, its tension and catharsis, in almost every scene. The film is ridiculous  on so many levels, the story playing out like the most monstrous version of Hansel & Gretel imaginable, and in that context, "ridiculous" is the highest possible praise.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O'Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master's in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Film credits.

The Visit (2015)

Rated PG-13 disturbing thematic material including terror, violence and some nudity, and for brief language

Kathryn Hahn as Mother

Ed Oxenbould as Tyler Jamison

Benjamin Kanes as Dad

Peter McRobbie as Pop-Pop

Olivia DeJonge as Rebecca Jamison

Deanna Dunagan as Nana

• M. Night Shyamalan

Cinematography

• Maryse Alberti
• Luke Franco Ciarrocch

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• Entertainment
• Movie Review

The Visit review: the most shocking M. Night Shyamalan twist is a good movie

• By Bryan Bishop
• on September 10, 2015 10:18 am

A decade ago it was impossible to discuss supernatural thrillers without invoking the name of M. Night Shyamalan. After exploding into the popular consciousness with The Sixth Sense , the writer-director staked his claim with carefully crafted follow-ups like Signs and Unbreakable , eventually leading Newsweek to dub him “The Next Spielberg.” But Shyamalan faltered soon thereafter, and by the time his sci-fi adaptation After Earth rolled around two years ago, his name was practically being hidden in studio marketing materials .

With irrelevancy lurking in the shadows, like one of his fictional boogeymen, the director needed to save his career. So Shyamalan switched things up — trying his hand at television with the quirky Wayward Pines , and leaving Hollywood behind altogether for his new movie The Visit . As the filmmaker told us in July , The Visit was a completely self-funded affair, with Shyamalan putting up the money so he could make a smaller film in relative secrecy without the interference of studios or outside influences. The result is the best snapshot we have of Shyamalan the filmmaker as he stands today.

Judging from the bonkers mix of horror and comedy that is The Visit , he may have gone totally insane — and that’s a wonderful thing.

The movie follows 15-year-old Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her younger brother Tyler (a hilarious Ed Oxenbould). Their mother, played by Kathryn Hahn, is still suffering in the wake of her recent divorce, and to give everyone some space, the kids go off for a week to visit their grandparents for the very first time. Nana and Pop Pop (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) are warm, if not a bit quirky, at first, but as the visit stretches on, it becomes clear that something is very, very wrong.

Yes, The Visit is a found footage movie, and it’s the first clue that this is a break from the Shyamalan we’ve seen before. As a director, he built his career on meticulously crafted shots and camera moves that carried an almost mathematical precision, but that’s all thrown out the window here. Becca is an aspiring filmmaker, intent on documenting the visit for her mom, and as she enlists Tyler to help, the film takes on a chaotic visual energy that adds a layer of unease when contrasted with Shyamalan’s methodical pace. Where it differs from the Paranormal Activities of the world is that it’s actually beautiful at times; very often Shyamalan simply can’t help but find a gorgeous way to light a scene or evoke a mood, and it keeps the film fresh where the sub-genre has otherwise been pummeled into the ground and left for dead.

But visual technique is only worth so much, and what makes The Visit tick is the two young lead actors, who after a bumpy start settle into their self-conscious, found footage groove. DeJonge is grounded and believable as the older sister, her character endlessly precious and pretentious about her own filmmaking in what feels like Shyamalan having a laugh at himself for once. Oxenbould’s Tyler, on the other end, is the film’s comedic engine; a junior high suburbanite with hip-hop aspirations (he calls himself "T-Diamond Stylus") that deploys a comical adolescent bravado to cover up struggles with his parents’ separation.

Laughs and scares stack in a Jenga of oddball entertainment

That’s the other big surprise here: The Visit is actually funny , and not in a passing joke kind of way. It’s wild and outrageous, stacking laughs and scares atop one another in a giant Jenga of oddball entertainment. Contrasted with the overthought restraint of Shyamalan’s earlier work, The Visit is the Wild West; the kind of movie that uses a character’s unnerving penchant for skulking around nude as both a running joke and surprise scare, and that takes another’s obsessive tendencies and pays them off with a scatalogical gag that had me laughing and cringing in equal measure. It doesn’t always work — the mix is so bizarre that some jokes simply fail to land — but there’s a giddy energy that courses through the movie from beginning to end.

More than anything else, it feels like Shyamalan Unleashed, operating without the weight of expectations for the first time in years. The filmmaker had actually focused on smaller, character-driven films before The Sixth Sense changed his career trajectory, but ever since that early success, his movies seemed to chase the same formula, twist endings and all. The Visit doesn’t seem concerned with living up to those expectations — there’s no mistaking this for a Spielbergian tale — and it’s a fresher story for it.

If The Visit was some midnight movie festival discovery, we’d be talking about its odd weirdness and the potential of its creator; we’d ask if they could take the promise of this small, indie film and transition into the land of big-scale studio movies. Oddly enough, it’s the same question that should be asked of Shyamalan now. But for the moment, he appears to be keeping things small. His next film is set to be another collaboration with Jason Blum, the low-budget horror producer behind Insidious and the Paranormal Activity films, and while people will certainly have higher expectations his next time out, I hope we see more of this weirder, care-free Shyamalan. He may not be making The Sixth Sense anymore, sure, but for the first time in a very long time, he’s making movies that are actually fun .

The Visit opens Friday, September 11th.

Verge Video: The Verge's interview with M. Night Shyamalan

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With ‘The Visit,’ M. Night Shyamalan Returns to His Filmmaking Roots

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By Brooks Barnes

• Aug. 18, 2015

LOS ANGELES — “I don’t know, bro. I was screwed up in the head.”

M. Night Shyamalan, ruminating last month about career choices gone wrong, spoke those words and then burst into a giddy giggle. Just kidding! But the tenderness in his eyes betrayed him: There was some truth in that tease.

In contrast to his first four studio movies, which were all substantial hits, starting with “The Sixth Sense” in 1999, Mr. Shyamalan’s last four films have been a series of misfires. “Lady in the Water,” “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender” and “ After Earth ” severely tarnished his reputation among moviegoers. The guy who brought us those clunkers — and, yes, we know, “The Sixth Sense” — wants us to buy tickets again?

But here comes a hairpin twist nobody anticipated: Mr. Shyamalan, 45, seemingly humbled and more mature, took a hard look at his professional life, made a course correction, and the result, a quirky comedic thriller called “ The Visit ,” may well deliver a surprise cinematic comeback, or at least the start of one.

After getting beaten bloody two years ago for “After Earth,” a father-and-son outer-space adventure starring a real-life father and son, Will Smith and Jaden Smith, Mr. Shyamalan detoured into television. He was part of the team behind “Wayward Pines,” a limited Fox mystery series that captivated viewers (if not all critics) this summer with its eccentricity. A second season is in the works.

“Because there are fewer resources in television, I learned how much fat I had on me, how many puffed-up bad habits,” Mr. Shyamalan said. “There was this great feeling of slowly shedding the fat.” (Donald De Line, a “Wayward Pines” executive producer, said Mr. Shyamalan was “positive, high-energy and collaborative” and “not remotely” imperious, as some studio executives maintain.)

On the filmmaking front, Mr. Shyamalan made another sharp turn, veering away from lumbering studio projects like “Airbender” and “After Earth” — movies that, unlike his earlier hits (“Signs,” “The Village,” “Unbreakable”), were not based on his own stories. “The Visit,” which he wrote, produced and directed, will arrive in theaters on Sept. 11. Mr. Shyamalan also spent roughly $5 million of his own money to make it.

“That may have been really stupid,” he said during an interview at the Hotel Bel-Air here, between sips of white wine and bites of tuna tartare. “But it heightened the risk. There was only one way out of this one. I had to make a great movie. It just had to work.”

Featuring one of Mr. Shyamalan’s signature surprise endings, “The Visit” is about two teenagers visiting their oddly behaving grandparents; Nana, played by Deanna Dunagan, scratches the walls at night, and Pop-Pop (Peter McRobbie) has a weird secret in the shed, among other places. The film has been an unexpected hit with audiences in sneak-peek screenings.

“I admit that I was skeptical going in,” said Alexa Hernandez, who saw “The Visit” in July as an attendee at Comic-Con International in San Diego. “But it was one of the best horror movies I’ve ever seen. And it was funny.” After an advance screening of “The Visit” last month, William Bibbiani, a critic at CraveOnline, wrote on Twitter, “M. Night Shyamalan’s best film in a very, very, VERY long time.”

As Mr. Shyamalan has learned the hard way, being an auteur director — projecting what is going on inside your head, cultural currents and ticket sales be darned — is perhaps Hollywood’s trickiest path. It can be done, but it usually leads to fallow periods at the box office. Woody Allen may be the best example. He does what he does, notably working outside the studio system, and the audience can like it or not.

Sitting cross-legged on a patio bench at the hotel, Mr. Shyamalan spoke bluntly about becoming a bit too trapped in his own head. He insisted that he had learned from his mistakes, drawing a comparison to David McCullough’s new biography on the Wright Brothers, which he just happened (ahem) to be carrying with him.

“The hundred failures that existed for them weren’t failures,” he said. “They would crash, and they would say: ‘That was great. I know what went wrong.’ ”

Mr. Shyamalan did not disavow any of his previous films. He said one of his favorites remains “Lady in the Water,” a money loser from 2006, the making of which was infamously chronicled in the book “The Man Who Heard Voices,” by Michael Bamberger. But Mr. Shyamalan conceded that his focus on the audience had taken a back seat to executing a vision.

“I didn’t realize that the sweet spot had shifted,” he said. “Once upon a time, David Fincher and Christopher Nolan were way over to one side, barely hanging on the table. They were just too somber and dark. And now they are dead center. Meanwhile, I was busy being sentimental. ‘Airbender’ was based on a children’s show and rated PG. ‘Lady in the Water’ started as a bedtime story I told my daughters.”

He continued: “For me, ‘E. T.’ was always the holy grail. I was 13 when I saw that movie and was weeping in the theater. There were other 13-year-old boys weeping in the theater. Do you know any 13-year-old boys that would do that today? The era that I grew up in was a warm, sentimental time. That audience doesn’t exist anymore. My daughter is going to go straight from Pixar to Seth Rogen.”

“The Visit” was acquired for release via Universal Pictures by Jason Blum , who has delivered the “Paranormal Activity,” “Purge,” “Insidious” and “Sinister” horror franchises over the past decade. “Night, who I chased for years and years, had the courage to take a break from the Hollywood system,” Mr. Blum said. “That is exactly the type of director we want to bet on.”

Like some of Mr. Shyamalan’s earlier movies, “The Visit” is an intimate family drama tucked inside a horror picture. It uses the well-worn shooting technique (albeit new to him) known as found footage; one of the characters, in this case a teenage girl, catches the action on a camcorder.

Mr. Shyamalan’s script tries to keep the audience guessing in more ways than one. “It wasn’t just about the twist,” he said. “In the moments of dark comedy, I wanted people to be thinking: ‘Am I supposed to be laughing or appalled? I can’t really tell. But I like it.’ ” (Watch for the bizarre scene with a dirty Depend diaper.)

By the end of “The Visit,” the teenage girl — she’s an aspiring filmmaker, explaining her constant recording — has changed from auteur to something a lot more relaxed, perhaps reflecting Mr. Shyamalan’s own recent shift.

“At first, she is striving so hard to make something of art and beauty,” he said, “and finally she says: ‘You know what? Let’s just have some fun.’ ”

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‘The Visit’ Ending Explained: Family Reunions Can Be Torture

What's wrong with Grandma?

The Big Picture

• In M. Night Shyamalan's The Visit , the main characters discover that the grandparents they are staying with are actually dangerous imposters.
• The twist is revealed when the children's mother realizes that the people claiming to be their grandparents are strangers who have assumed their identities.
• The climax of the film involves a tense and dangerous confrontation between the children and the imposters, resulting in the reveal of the true identities of the grandparents.

M. Night Shyamalan is considered a master at delivering drop-your-popcorn-level twisty conclusions to his haunting films. People still talk about the end of The Sixth Sense as perhaps one of the greatest twists in the history of modern cinema. The jaw-dropper at the end of Unbreakable ranks close to the top as well. But there is another pretty decent curveball that the director tosses up in a lesser-known movie that is currently streaming on Max. In 2016's The Visit (which is currently streaming on Max ) he plays on the hallowed relationship between children and their doting grandparents. How could Shyamalan toy with the innocence of this? It is an excellent film that deftly blends found footage with the director's signature slow-burning tension to leave audiences with yet another "WTF?" moment . Let's dig into what exactly happens at the end of his underrated movie, The Visit .

Two siblings become increasingly frightened by their grandparents' disturbing behavior while visiting them on vacation.

What is 'The Visit' About?

Young Becca Jamison ( Olivia DeJonge ) and little brother Tyler ( Ed Oxenbould ) are sent away by their divorced mother Loretta ( Kathryn Hahn ) to finally meet and spend some time with their grandparents , Frederick, or Pop Pop ( Peter McRobbie ), and Maria, better known as Nana ( Deanna Dunagan ). They have a nice rural estate away from the hustle and bustle of the city, and it feels like this is going to be a heartwarming story of two generations of the Jamisons getting to know each other. It seems a bit odd that these two preteens have yet to meet their maternal grandparents, but Shyamalan explains that nicely in the first few scenes: Loretta has had a years-long falling out with her parents after leaving the family farm at the age of 19.

M. Night Shyamalan’s Eerie Found Footage Horror Movie Deserves Another Look

Loretta is still estranged from her parents but she wants her children to have a relationship with them — she only wants to go on a cruise with her new boyfriend and needs someone to watch the kids. So, the children have no idea what their Nana and Pop Pop actually look like. And you can feel something amiss from the very beginning of the film as the two precocious but excited kids set off to meet their grandparents. The entire film is told through the kids' (mainly Becca, an aspiring filmmaker) camcorder, as they have decided to document their trip. It's clear right away that Becca resents her father as a result of his abandonment, as she refuses to include any footage of her dad in her film.

Shyamalan Expertly Builds Tension in 'The Visit'

Upon the kids' arrival, Nana and Pop Pop seem like regular grandparents with regular questions like, "Do you like sports?" and "Why are your pants so low?" Nana tends to the chores like cooking and cleaning while Pop Pop handles the more rugged work outdoors like cutting wood. Naturally, Shyamalan tightens the screws immediately when the audience discovers that there is little to no cell phone reception, so he can isolate our four players into a single space. The Grandparents seem fairly easygoing but they have one strict rule — the kids must not come out of their bedroom after 9:30 pm. The very first night, Nana exhibits some bizarre behavior, walking aimlessly through the downstairs portion of the house and vomiting on the floor. However, the next morning she seems to be just fine.

Pop Pop explains to Becca and Tyler that she suffers from "sundowning" which is a very real diagnosis that usually affects the elderly . He tells them that at night Nana gets this feeling that something is in her body and just wants to get out. Pop Pop is clear and coherent, and yet again, we, along with our two young lead characters, assume the grandparents, while odd, are nothing to fear. A Zoom call with Loretta further assuages their fear by explaining away all the strange behavior as part of getting older. It's a back-and-forth that Shyamalan expertly navigates by pushing the audience only so far before reeling it back in with a logical explanation. But soon, things become inexplicably dire and dangerous.

"What's in the shed?" Tyler asks as he looks into the camera while contributing to Becca's documentary . "Is it dead bodies?" What he discovers is a pile of used, discarded adult diapers filled with Pop Pop's excrement. The smell sends Tyler reeling, and he falls out of the shed onto the snowy ground. This time, it's Nana who explains away Pop Pop's odd behavior. She tells her grandson that Pop Pop has incontinence and is so proud that he hides his waste in the shed. At this point, everything seems very odd to say the least, but there is nothing to suggest anything sinister is afoot . Not yet anyway. Even after he attacks a random stranger who he believes is watching him out on the streets on a trip into town, you still just think that maybe Pop Pop may just have a loose screw. However, the sense that these elderly people are something more than doting parents is intensified when Nana leaves Becca inside the oven for several seconds.

What Is the Twist at the End of 'The Visit'?

"Those aren't your grandparents?" Get the heck out of here! What?! Loretta finally sees the two people claiming to be her parents and tells Becca and Tyler via Skype that they aren't their beloved Nana and Pop Pop, but two complete strangers who have assumed their identities. Loretta immediately calls the police, but it will take hours for help to arrive at the remote farmhouse. Becca and Tyler are going to have to play along with these dangerous imposters. After the most tense and awkward game of Yahtzee in the history of board games, things get really, really ugly. Nana and Pop Pop haven't laid a hand on either of the kids in the movie so far. You can feel the slow and excruciating tension that Shyamalan is building . He knows that the audience is waiting for that "point of no return" moment when it is crystal clear that Becca and Tyler's lives are in danger. Becca manages to escape to the basement to discover the dead bodies of two elderly people murdered. Nana and Pop Pop are escaped mental patients from the nearby psychiatric hospital and have killed the real Jamison grandparents.

What Happens at the End of 'The Visit'?

Pop Pop realizes their cover is blown and becomes physical with Becca. He's upset that Becca is ruining Nana's perfect week as a grandmother. He tells her, "We're all dying today, Becca!" pushing her into a pitch-black upstairs room. Meanwhile, he grabs Tyler and takes him into the kitchen, and does one of the most foul and stomach-turning things ever in a Shyamalan film . He takes his used diaper and shoves it in the boy's face. He knows that Tyler is a germaphobe, and it is the most diabolical and traumatizing thing he could do to the boy. Becca is trapped upstairs with the sundowning Nana, fighting for her own life. After a struggle, Becca grasps a shard of glass from the broken mirror and is able to stab Nana multiple times in the gut.

She breaks the lock on the door and runs downstairs to help Tyler. She pulls "Pop Pop" off her traumatized younger brother. Suddenly, Tyler snaps out of his stupor and releases the pent-up anger of his football tackling lessons with his estranged father. He knocks Pop Pop to the ground and slams the refrigerator door on his head over and over . This is significant because earlier in the movie, Becca ribs Tyler about how he froze up during a big play in a youth football game, and this time he comes through to save Becca in the final kitchen scene conquering his biggest fears.

Loretta and the police arrive and the kids run frantically out of the house. The final scene has Loretta setting the record straight for the documentary about the traumatic moments surrounding her running away from home. 15 years before the events of the film, before Becca was born, Loretta fell out with her parents over her decision to marry her teacher. The argument led to Loretta and her parents getting physical with each other, and she left home that night and never responded to their attempts and pleas to reconnect. It's the most emotional scene in the film as Loretta is feeling a huge amount of guilt at never getting to say she was sorry for the strained relationship between her and her parents or getting to possibly hear an apology for the wrongs they also committed. Loretta tells Becca "Don't hold on to anger! You hear me?" The two then share a meaningful embrace. And the final shot is of the two kids with their dad on a birthday when they were much younger.

The Visit is available to stream on Max in the U.S.

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The Ending Of The Visit Explained

Contains spoilers for  The Visit

M. Night Shyamalan is notorious for using dramatic twists towards the endings of his films, some of which are pulled off perfectly and add an extra layer of depth to a sprawling story (hello, Split ). Some of the director's other offerings simply keep the audience on their toes rather than having any extra subtext or hidden meaning. Shyamalan's 2015 found-footage horror-comedy  The Visit , which he wrote and directed, definitely fits in the latter category, aiming for style over substance.

The Visit follows 15-year-old Becca Jamison (Olivia DeJonge) and her 13-year-old brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) when they spend the week with their mother's estranged parents, who live in another town. Loretta (played by WandaVision 's Kathryn Hahn ) never explained to her children why she separated herself away from her parents, but clearly hopes the weekend could help bring the family back together.

Although The Visit occasionally toys with themes of abandonment and fear of the unknown, it wasn't particularly well-received by critics on its initial release, as many struggled with its bizarre comedic tone in the found-footage style. So, after Tyler and his camera record a number of disturbing occurrences like Nana (Deanna Dunagan) projectile-vomiting in the middle of the night and discovering "Pop Pop"'s (Peter McRobbie) mountain of used diapers, it soon becomes clear that something isn't right with the grandparents.

Here's the ending of  The Visit  explained.

The Visit's twist plays on expectations

Because Shyamalan sets up the idea of the separation between Loretta and her parents very early on — and doesn't show their faces before Becca and Tyler meet them — the film automatically creates a false sense of security. Even more so since the found-footage style restricts the use of typical exposition methods like flashbacks or other scenes which would indicate that Nana and Pop Pop aren't who they say they are. Audiences have no reason to expect that they're actually two escapees from a local psychiatric facility.

The pieces all come together once Becca discovers her  real grandparents' corpses in the basement, along with some uniforms from the psychiatric hospital. It confirms "Nana" and "Pop-Pop" escaped from the institution and murdered the Jamisons because they were a similar age, making it easy to hide their whereabouts from the authorities. And they would've gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids.)

However, after a video call from Loretta reveals that the pair aren't her parents, the children are forced to keep up appearances — but the unhinged duo start to taunt the siblings. Tyler in particular is forced to face his fear of germs as "Pop Pop" wipes dirty diapers in his face. The germophobia is something Shyamalan threads through Tyler's character throughout The Visit,  and the encounter with "Pop Pop" is a basic attempt of showing he's gone through some kind of trial-by-fire to get over his fears.

But the Jamison kids don't take things lying down: They fight back in vicious fashion — a subversion of yet another expectation that young teens might would wait for adults or law enforcement officers to arrive before doing away with their tormentors.

Its real message is about reconciliation

By the time Becca stabs "Nana" to death and Tyler has repeatedly slammed "Pop-Pop"'s head with the refrigerator door, their mother and the police do arrive to pick up the pieces. In a last-ditch attempt at adding an emotional undertone, Shyamalan reveals Loretta left home after a huge argument with her parents. She hit her mother, and her father hit her in return. But Loretta explains that reconciliation was always on the table if she had stopped being so stubborn and just reached out. One could take a domino-effect perspective and even say that Loretta's stubbornness about not reconnecting and her sustained distance from her parents put them in exactly the vulnerable position they needed to be for "Nana" and "Pop-Pop" to murder them. 

Loretta's confession actually mirrors something "Pop-Pop" told Tyler (before his run-in with the refrigerator door): that he and "Nana" wanted to spend one week as a normal family before dying. They should've thought about that before murdering a pair of innocent grandparents, but here we are. 

So, is The Visit  trying to say that if we don't keep our families together, they'll be replaced by imposters and terrify our children? Well, probably not. The Visit tries to deliver a message about breaking away from old habits, working through your fears, and stop being so stubborn over arguments that don't have any consequences in the long-run. Whether it actually sticks the landing on all of those points is still up for debate.

Film Review: ‘The Visit’

M. Night Shyamalan returns to thriller filmmaking in the style of low-budget impresario Jason Blum with mixed results.

By Geoff Berkshire

Geoff Berkshire

Associate Editor, Features

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After delivering back-to-back creative and commercial duds in the sci-fi action genre, M. Night Shyamalan retreats to familiar thriller territory with “ The Visit .” As far as happy homecomings go, it beats the one awaiting his characters, though not by much. The story of two teens spending a week with the creepy grandparents they’ve never met unfolds in a mockumentary style that’s new for the filmmaker and old hat for horror auds. Heavier on comic relief (most of it intentional) than genuine scares, this low-budget oddity could score decent opening weekend B.O. and ultimately find a cult following thanks to its freakier twists and turns, but hardly represents a return to form for its one-time Oscar-nominated auteur.

In a way, it’s a relief to see Shyamalan set aside the studio-system excesses of “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth” and get down and dirty with a found-footage-style indie crafted in the spirit of producer Jason Blum’s single location chillers. (Blum actually joined the project after filming wrapped, but it subscribes to his patented “Paranormal Activity” playbook to a T.) Except that the frustrating result winds up on the less haunting end of Shyamalan’s filmography, far south of “The Sixth Sense,” “Signs” and “The Village,” and not even as unsettling as the most effective moments in the hokey “The Happening.”

That’s not to say “The Visit” is necessarily worse than some of those efforts, just a different kind of animal. The simplicity of the premise initially works in the pic’s favor as 15-year-old aspiring documentarian Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her 13-year-old aspiring-rap-star sibling Tyler (Ed Oxenbould of “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) say goodbye to their hard-working single mom (Kathryn Hahn, better than the fleeting role deserves), who ships off on a weeklong cruise with her latest boyfriend. The kids travel by train to rural Pennsylvania to meet Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), the purportedly kindly parents Mom left behind when she took off with her high-school English teacher and caused a permanent rift in the family.

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Becca plans to turn the whole experience into an Oscar-caliber documentary (proving she sets her sights higher than Shyamalan these days) and also an opportunity to exorcise the personal demons both she and Tyler carry around in the wake of their parents’ separation. Unfortunately for the kids, their grandparents appear to be possessed by demons of another kind — although it takes an awfully long time for them to grow legitimately concerned about Nana’s nasty habit of roaming the house at night, vomiting on the floor and scratching at the walls in the nude, and Pop Pop’s almost-as-bizarre behavior, including stuffing a woodshed full of soiled adult diapers, attacking a stranger on the street and regularly dressing in formal wear for a “costume party” that never materializes.

Ominous warnings to not go into the basement (because of “mold,” you see) and stay in their room after 9:30 (Nana’s “bedtime”) fly right over the heads of our otherwise pop-culture-savvy protagonists. Becca even stubbornly refuses to use her omnipresent camera for nighttime reconnaissance, citing concerns over exploitation and “cinematic standards” — one of the lamest excuses yet to justify dumb decisions in a horror narrative — until the weeklong stay is almost up.

Shyamalan has long been criticized for serving up borderline (or downright) silly premises with a straight face and overtly pretentious atmosphere, but he basically abandons that approach here in favor of a looser, more playful dynamic between his fresh-faced leads. At the same time, there’s a surreal campiness to the grandparents’ seemingly inexplicable behavior, fully embraced by Tony winner Dunagan and Scottish character actor McRobbie, that encourages laughter between ho-hum jump scares. Their antics only reach full-blown menacing in the perverse-by-PG-13-standards third act. (The obligatory reveal of what’s really going on works OK, as long as you don’t question it any more than anyone onscreen ever does.)

Even if there’s less chance the audience will burst out in fits of inappropriate chuckles, as was often the case in, say, “The Happening” or “Lady in the Water,” Shyamalan still can’t quite pull off the delicate tonal balance he’s after. Once events ultimately do turn violent — and Nana does more than just scamper around the floor or pop up directly in front of the camera — the setpieces are never as scary or suspenseful as they should be. Even worse are the film’s attempts at character-driven drama, including a couple of awkward soul-baring monologues from the otherwise poised young stars, and a ludicrous epilogue that presumes auds will have somehow formed an emotional bond with characters who actually remain skin-deep throughout. One longs to see what a nervier filmmaker could have done with the concept (and a R rating).

The technical package is deliberately less slick than the Shyamalan norm, although scripting Becca as a budding filmmaker interested in mise en scene provides d.p. Maryse Alberti (whose numerous doc credits include multiple Alex Gibney features) an excuse to capture images with a bit more craft than the average found footage thriller. Shyamalan purposefully decided to forego an original score, but the soundtrack is rarely silent between the chattering of the children, a selection of source music and the eerie sound editing that emphasizes every creaking door and loud crash substituting for well-earned frights.

Reviewed at Arclight Cinemas, Hollywood, Sept. 8, 2015. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 94 MIN.

• Production: A Universal release of a Blinding Edge Pictures and Blumhouse production. Produced by Jason Blum, Marc Bienstock, M. Night Shyamalan. Executive producers, Steven Schneider, Ashwin Rajan.
• Crew: Directed, written by M. Night Shyamalan. Camera (color, HD), Maryse Alberti; editor, Luke Ciarrocchi; music supervisor, Susan Jacobs; production designer, Naaman Marshall; art director, Scott Anderson; set decorator, Christine Wick; costume designer, Amy Westcott; sound (Dolby Digital), David J. Schwartz; supervising sound editor/re-recording mixer, Skip Lievsay; visual effects supervisor, Ruben Rodas; visual effects, Dive VFX; stunt coordinator, Manny Siverio; casting, Douglas Aibel.
• With: Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn, Celia Keenan-Bolger.

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The Visit is a 2015 American comedy horror film written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan . The film stars Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Deanna Dunagan, Peter McRobbie and Kathryn Hahn. The film was released in North America on September 11, 2015 by Universal Pictures.

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The Visit streaming: where to watch online?

Currently you are able to watch "The Visit" streaming on Max, Max Amazon Channel, Cinemax Amazon Channel, Cinemax Apple TV Channel. It is also possible to buy "The Visit" on AMC on Demand, Apple TV, Amazon Video, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft Store as download or rent it on Amazon Video, Apple TV, Google Play Movies, YouTube, Vudu, Microsoft Store, Spectrum On Demand online.

Where does The Visit rank today? The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

Streaming charts last updated: 5:20:05 AM, 05/12/2024

The Visit is 2223 on the JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts today. The movie has moved up the charts by 737 places since yesterday. In the United States, it is currently more popular than Host but less popular than Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.

A brother and sister are sent to their grandparents' remote Pennsylvania farm for a week, where they discover that the elderly couple is involved in something deeply disturbing.

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Streaming Charts The JustWatch Daily Streaming Charts are calculated by user activity within the last 24 hours. This includes clicking on a streaming offer, adding a title to a watchlist, and marking a title as 'seen'. This includes data from ~1.3 million movie & TV show fans per day.

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How “Servant” prepared Ishana Night Shyamalan to make “The Watchers”

“It was the best training ground I could have had,” the young director says of her experience on the Apple TV+ series.

EW's 2024 Summer Preview has dozens of exclusive looks at the most anticipated TV shows, movies, books, and music of entertainment's hottest season. Continue to visit  ew.com  throughout May for more previews of what you'll be watching, reading, and listening to in the months to come.  

Television and film are not synonymous art forms. Writers and directors who find success in one format can’t always translate their skills to the other. But Servant was not like most shows.

Though M. Night Shyamalan executive produced and directed the premiere of the Apple TV+ series about a Philadelphia family’s strange response to the death of their infant child, he was always insistent that every other director have creative freedom with their episodes. That made it an ideal learning experience for young filmmakers like Palme d’Or winner Julia Ducournau and his own daughter, Ishana Night Shyamalan, whose feature debut The Watchers hits theaters this summer. 

“It was the best training ground I could have had,” Shyamalan tells Entertainment Weekly . “With those 30-minute episodes, I got to exercise both my structural dialogue skills in writing and then also learned how to do as much visual storytelling, and curation of vibe and tone, as possible with directing. The TV world moves so fast that you don't really have time to think about it. You are continuing to learn and grow at this very rapid rate. So that was wonderful. It was like doing short film after short film in a very isolated period of time.”

As the daughter of an acclaimed filmmaker, a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and now a seasoned writer/director of short films, Shyamalan has long harbored dreams of directing her own feature. And the timing just happened to work out perfectly, when a producer brought her Irish author A.M. Shine’s novel The Watchers just as Servant was wrapping up. 

“I knew by the time I finished the book that it captured exactly the tone that I wanted to explore and play in,” Shyamalan says. “It had all these rich visuals and just felt like an endless well of inspiration. So it was one of those things that feels like divine timing — it came at the exact moment when I was seeking it. It’s like what they say about trying on a wedding dress: You know it when you feel it. I just knew when I read it that this was meant to be.”

The first trailer for The Watchers establishes an eerie sense of mystery. Dakota Fanning stars as Mina, a 28-year-old artist who gets stranded in an Irish forest. Though she finds shelter, she and the other lost people taking refuge in an isolated building find themselves observed by unseen creatures. The trailer has minimal dialogue, opting instead for creepy visuals like a winged skeleton or Fanning’s Mina tapping on a mirror that she suspects is a window on the other side. 

“For me, it's always about visual elements first. The thing I love more than anything else in the film process is playing with colors and textures,” Shyamalan says. “So when I read the book, it felt like it had all these opportunities. He described environments in a very emotional, sensory way, and I had very distinctive visuals that came to mind as I was reading it. Those visuals are exactly what exists in the movie. It just feels like magic when you get to do that.”

As it happens, both Shyamalan and her father have new films coming out this summer; his Trap stars Josh Hartnett as a serial killer who realizes he’s being targeted by police while at a concert with his daughter. Shyamalan says the timing is coincidental but ended up coming together in a cute way. 

“I filmed last summer, and then literally the day I locked my film, he started his prep,” she says. “So it’s kind of been madness. Now we're editing side by side. We have two editing rooms on either side of the theater, and it's just back and forth — we’re in each other's editing rooms and talking about the movies. It’s this really cool flow.”

The Watchers hits theaters on June 7. 

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• M. Night Shyamalan's daughter is now directing her own mind-bending movies like The Watchers
• Why M. Night Shyamalan brought in his daughter Ishana to direct  Servant  episodes
• Why  Servant  had to end with that epic confrontation between Dorothy and Leanne

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly .

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A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatur... Read all A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night. A young artist gets stranded in an extensive, immaculate forest in western Ireland, where, after finding shelter, she becomes trapped alongside three strangers, stalked by mysterious creatures each night.

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No way the twist is that simple in m. night shyamalan's new movie.

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M. Night Shyamalan's New Horror Movie Twist Can Redeem Last Year's $54.8M Misfire

Mel gibson's mad max franchise return gets honest response from creator george miller, christopher nolan’s new remake has a perfect lead role for 1 actor he's not worked with since 2017.

• Shyamalan's movie Trap reveals its big twist in the first trailer, surprising viewers.
• Hartnett's character in Trap may have more to his twist beyond being the villain.
• Shyamalan's movies typically have multiple twists, and Trap may follow suit.

M. Night Shyamalan’s new psychological thriller is Trap , and the first trailer has already revealed the movie’s twist, but there must be something more. M. Night Shyamalan has become known for the supernatural elements in his movies and his use of plot twists and shocking reveals, though not all of them have had the desired effect. Still, Shyamalan’s projects always create a lot of expectations and attract the audience’s interest, and now all eyes are on his two 2024 horror movies : The Watchers and Trap .

Also written by Shyamalan, Trap takes place at the concert of pop star Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan), and it follows Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his teenage daughter, Riley, as they attend the concert. During a bathroom break, Cooper notices police officers everywhere, security cameras all over the place, and police vans outside the venue. Cooper learns that the whole concert is a trap for a serial killer known as “The Butcher” , as the police knew he was going to be in attendance. Unsurprisingly, Trap has a big twist, but to everyone’s surprise, it has already been revealed in the trailer.

The twists in M. Night Shyamalan's last year's $54.8 million thriller may have been a little underwhelming but his new movie will likely redeem it.

Trap's Josh Hartnett Reveal Can't Be The Only Movie Twist

Trap revealing its villain twist right away must be hiding something.

The twists in Shyamalan’s movies often arrive towards the end of the movie, so Trap revealing its big villain twist in the first trailer is surprising and intriguing.

The first trailer for Trap reveals the movie’s twist in the most intriguing way. Once Cooper enters a bathroom stall, he checks a security camera from the basement of his house on his phone, revealing Cooper as the serial killer as he’s holding a man hostage . The trailer adds a quick shot of a man, presumably Cooper, taking a butcher knife from a table before returning to a close-up of Hartnett’s eyes with a disturbing red filter. The rest of the trailer emphasizes Cooper’s odd behavior, with quick shots of chaos happening at the venue.

The twists in Shyamalan’s movies often arrive towards the end of the movie, so Trap revealing its big villain twist in the first trailer is surprising and intriguing. However, the true identity of Hartnett’s character can’t be the only twist in Trap . Cooper (if that’s his real name, of course) could be a killer but not The Butcher , and he could just be at the wrong place at the wrong time. Cooper could also not be a killer at all and could be imagining that he is, which would be a shocking twist but one that should be done with care to avoid disappointment.

M. Night Shyamalan's New Movie Likely Involves Multiple Twists

M. night shyamalan’s is known for the many twists in his movies.

Many of Shyamalan’s movies have twists in their third acts, but some have another, albeit most of the time minor, twist before. The Visit , for example, reveals the grandparents behave quite dangerously, only to be later revealed to not be the kids’ real grandparents. Unbreakable revealed Bruce Willis’ David Dunn is, in fact, a real-life superhero, but also that his “mentor” Elijah (Samuel L. Jackson) was the one who caused a series of accidents in search for his counterpart, as he sees himself as a supervillain.

Glass had the twist of Kevin’s (James McAvoy) father dying in the train crash Elijah provoked, and Elijah making sure that the world knows superheroes are real. Other Shyamalan movies had one twist, which, in some cases, was big enough to elevate the entire movie, as was the one in The Sixth Sense . It’s expected, then, that Trap will have another twist, though it could also happen that the other twist is that there’s none .

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