Something’s Wrong With Nanna
By Lucy O’Brien
With its keen eye on the most sinister fears of our childhoods, The Visit proves once again that horror is where writer, director and producer M. Night Shyamalan should set up camp. It’s both an assured return to form for the filmmaker and a welcome spin on his usual formula, where comedy sits comfortably alongside genuine frights.
Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge play Tyler and Rebecca Jamison, young siblings travelling to rural Pennsylvania to meet their estranged grandparents for the first time, much to the distress of Kathryn Hahn’s single mother. An aspiring filmmaker with a big heart, Rebecca wants to document the whole thing as a form of therapy for her mum, whose reasons for the bad blood with her parents remain a tightly-kept secret.
The journey is told through the lens’ of these two kids, which brings a great candidness to The Visit. We not only get to see the remarkably natural chemistry between Oxenbould and DeJonge through their handheld cameras – Rebecca’s bemusement as she films Tyler freestyle rapping will be familiar for anyone with an eccentric younger brother – but we’re invited into their desires and anxieties through straight-to-camera confessions and interviews.
Of course, the found-footage approach is primarily employed to unnerve us once Rebecca and Tyler meet their grandparents, known only as “Nana” (Deanna Dunagan) and “Pop Pop” (Peter McRobbie). Though initially warm and familiarly fuddy-duddy, things quickly turn weird once Pop Pop tells them that bedtime is at “9:30 sharp in this household”; a rule the pair will inevitably break as they creep into dark corridors with their cameras pointing into the blackness.
What they see through their monitors marks the beginning of a perverse series of events as Rebecca and Tyler realise their grandparents may not be quite the salt-of-the-earth pair they first thought. There’s an awful, primal fear buried in this concept, assisted by wonderfully unhinged performances by Dunagan and McRobbie, who veer wildly between who they are and the type of grandparents they want to be.
The scares in The Visit are relentless and utterly ridiculous, but that’s the point. What separates The Visit’s flavour of horror from Shyamalan’s previous efforts is an enormous sense of fun. While he doesn’t quite reach the subversive heights of, say, a young Peter Jackson, Shyamalan comes damn close here: Dunagan in particular adds a freewheeling lunacy, her slight frame and skittishness employed to hilarious effect throughout.
The two endearing kids add to the comedy. Instead of being ciphers for the horror, they are keen commentators of it, spinning jokes out of the terrible things they’ve seen and keenly hypothesising on what could be stashed in Pop Pop’s mysterious barn. This could come off as pretentious in the wrong hands, but Oxenbould and DeJonge never once veer into self-aware territory.
Like all of Shyamalan’s films, there is an emotional heart to The Visit. While it rings true for the most part – themes of grief and loss are the throughline here – it’s occasionally over-illustrated, and a groan-worthy moment crashes the otherwise thrilling climax. Similarly, a heavy-handed final sequence could have been snipped without losing anything; I wish Shyamalan’s regular editor Luke Franco Ciarrocchi had been a little more ruthless.
Still, The Visit is great fun. It’s genuinely funny while still managing to tap into our dark fears of the familiar becoming terrifyingly unfamiliar, of sweet turning suddenly sour. It’s also Shyamalan’s best film in years, and should be celebrated as such.
