Maybe
Truth or Dare **
Yet another reminder that the only memorable game-turned-movie is "Clue"! Is it worth $10? No At...
M. Night Shyamalan returns to form in this eerie thriller.
Is it worth $10? Yes
After giving us the drudgery of “After Earth” and “The Last Airbender” in recent years, M. Night Shyamalan (“The Sixth Sense”) is back in fine thriller form with “The Visit,” a spooky low-budget creeper that nicely mixes humor and horror.
With their mother (Kathryn Hahn, “Parks and Recreation”) on a cruise, early teen Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her little brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent to frosty rural Pennsylvania for the week to spend time with their grandparents, affectionately called Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie). Things are fine at first, even if the kids are forbidden to go in the basement and have a strict bedtime of 9:30 p.m. Weird sounds nonetheless keep them awake, and after naked Nana scratches the walls late at night they know they’re in for the weirdest week of their lives. But are they actually in danger? Part of the fun of the movie is that you’re not sure for a while, and then it becomes unmistakable.
“The Visit” doesn’t have a musical score, which is important when you consider how many so-called “horror” movies rely on a jolt from the soundtrack to provide a scare. Instead, Shyamalan – who wrote and directed the film – is back to good ‘ole fashioned filmmaking craftsmanship here, effectively allowing the eeriness to speak for itself without ever feeling forced.
That’s the frustrating thing about M. Night Shyamalan: We know how good he can be (“The Sixth Sense”), and how bad (“The Last Airbender”), and it feels like the bigger the budget the worse the movie is. With more money (“Airbender”) he has more tools to play with, and more responsibility to show the big budget on screen, and the results feel compulsory. In contrast, when his resources are limited, as they were with the $5 million budget on “The Visit,” he’s able to focus on what he has, not be distracted by excess, and provide a better product. Moral of the story: Production companies, stop giving M. Night Shyamalan boatloads of money!
Did you know?
Although it appears the children shot the film, it was in fact Shyamalan’s camera operators who did most of the filming. The only scene the kids actually shot was the “Hide and Seek” game because the camera operator was too big to fit under the porch.
'The Visit' Movie opens 9/11. Get tickets here!