Thursday, July 06, 2017

Review: The Visit (2015)

The Visit is an interesting little film which I suppose falls in the 'found footage' subgenre. A couple of kids are making a documentary film and so record everything ... In order to facilitate their mother getting back with their father, they go to stay with their grandparents, who they have never met ...

On arrival though, the grandparents seem somewhat ... unstable ... Pop Pop seems to go loopy during rhe day, soiling nappies and keeping them in a shed, while grandmother goes insane at night, stalking about in the nude and scratching at the walls ...

The kids try to make sense of it all, but as this is a M Night Shyamalan film, it's in the last act that we find out what's really going on - and if you've been paying close attention, it's not too hard to figure out - and the film ends with the mother racing to rescue them ...

Overall it's actually pretty good. The performances of all the leads are excellent, and the young kid's rapping aside, it's an enjoyable watch. Strangely for a director of Shyamalan's cachet it feels like a mega-low budget affair, with limited locations, a small cast, and not even much in the way of effects.

It has a very slow start and build up, but this sort of pays off towards the end ... even if you have guessed what's going on ...

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