Over the course of his career, M. Night Shyamalan has shown a deft hand with horror and suspense, a major tone-deafness with interpersonal drama, and a slippery grasp on anything approaching humor. These attributes come out to varying degrees depending on which Shyamalan joint you’re watching, but never has the writer/director thrown himself at a little bit of everything with the perplexing abandon he does in The Visit. Not just a horror-comedy, the film is a sort of horror-comedy-drama from the mind of a man 
The found-footage film, we’re to understand, is pieced together from video shot by aspiring teenaged filmmaker Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge) during a visit to her grandparents’ house with her younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould). The weeklong stay will be the first time the siblings have ever met Grandma Doris (Deanna Dunagan) and Grandpa John (Peter McRobbie), thanks to their mother’s (Kathryn Hahn) estranged relationship with her family. At first the grandparents seem sweet, if a little spacey, but the situation quickly turns unsettling. Doris has a penchant for bizarre nighttime behavior, running, crawling, and vomiting around the house as if possessed. And John is oddly overprotective, both of Doris and of whatever he’s keeping in the shed out back.
As Shyamalan ratchets up the weirdness, he also can’t seem to stop dropping in bits of grating humor. In the film’s most irritating running joke, Tyler is an aspiring rapper who freestyles constantly and insists on introducing himself as “T. Diamond Styles.” Yes, the little white kid rapping is obnoxious. No, the obnoxiousness is not funny. Meanwhile, Shyamalan’s also got some Hallmark-level character drama to nurse along. Why won’t the pretty but precocious Rebecca look at herself in a mirror? And what exactly did happen between the kids’ mom and their grandparents so long ago? The answers are sure to underwhelm you.
Not every plot beat is a dud, but as the saying goes, even a stopped clock is right twice a day. There’s a nice hide-and-seek game set under a porch that has a sufficient amount of creepiness, capped with a clever humorous punch line. 
Shyamalan’s schizophrenia hits a mind-boggling peak in the film’s ending – make that endings, because there are three of steeply diminishing quality. First the horror ending, which actually works rather well. Fade to black, then the tear-jerking family-drama ending, which works very poorly. Fade to black again, then – spoiler alert, I guess – a final rap from the obnoxious kid. After a decade or so of widely ridiculed films from Lady In the Water (2006) to After Earth (2013), the whole thing feels rather desperate on Shyamalan’s part. And it’s even more pathetic for the fact that his usually elegant visual style is here largely jettisoned to adhere to a found-footage aesthetic, the increasingly tiresome horror trend of the moment. As The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000) recede yet further in the rear-view mirror, The Visit feels like a filmmaker grasping at every straw in sight in his latest bid for relevancy.
Patrick Dunn
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