I
think I'll put this down as a comedy...? There were a lot of jokes
right after creepy shit anyway. Tonally it was all over the place.
Two kids go visit their estranged grandparents who act weird, and
then it turns out they were crazy people impersonating their
grandparents. Oh, sorry; spoilers. You should have known it was going
to be some twist like that though, being a Shyamalan flick. I was
surprised they didn't turn out to be ghosts, or aliens, or possessed,
or something. Crazy is tame, really.
It's
pretty slow, then it gets crazy at the end, then there's a weirdly
jarring scene with the mum telling us what the movie was apparently
about, and then there was a horrible bit of rapping. Hopefully you
have already left the cinema at that point.
The
kids were annoying. The girl's film making pretensions annoyed me
(though who am I to talk?) and the boy's rapping annoyed me even
more. At least they tried to give them a little character though,
despite it feeling kind of false.
The
style is also odd. It's found footage, and occasionally it's edited
like she's finished her documentary, but a lot of the time it's just
random badly centred shots of nonsense. It feels lazy, but a lot of
supposedly found footage films are now taking the lazy route, so
whatever.
The
whole film made me feel uncomfortable, but not in a scared way, more
in a watching 'The Office' kind of a way. I cringe at the kids being
embarrassing or the old people making up excuses for weird shit more
than anything else. It just wasn't scary, though: a major problem for
a horror. I just can't manage to find crazy old people scary. In the film they're evenly matched because it's kids versus old people, but it's not something I can apply to real life. Just push them down the stairs already, jeez.
It's
the kind of silliness you can leave on in the background while you,
say, finish your review of 'Poltergeist' though, so that's good.
The Visit: 27.9