[CRITICAL] THE VISIT

Shyamalan is one of those directors whose renewal just so happen that we wonder if it is possible. Presented as the new Spielberg there was that a few years, hope the fallen is coming to do two blockbusters misfires (The Last airbender and After Earth), and returns in 2015 with a film which is smaller, more modest. Our fears were aroused when it was learned that this new film would be a found-footage, a genre outdated and worn down to the marrow, whose reinvention does not seem to be an option. M. Night Shyamalan has already rubbed at the fantastic Sixth Sense and Signs (see The Village, in a lesser extent), and has demonstrated brilliantly his ability to be a brilliant creator of anxiety.

The process film used lodge its limits in its own codes formal. First, in the necessity narrative of filming the events as a character in danger, will always be the middle of filming. Except that this gesture defuses any notion of realism which wants to conform to the gender. Then in the sense of framing, sometimes too much film and not in accordance with the shooting enthusiast. That is to say that one feels the director of the film behind the way to frame the character. THE VISIT did not escape this charge but will seek in the character of Becca, a justification – she is a lover of cinema with a solid foundation in the subject. After these remarks, addressed more to the genre than the film alone, it must be said that we find the Shyamalan that we love. The one that builds up the tension with the everyday, with the doubt between the explainable and the fantastic. Has as the film progresses, the two children discover the strange behavior of the grandparents, but the scene after comes to bring a rational explanation of the acts. If while the accumulation of reasons becomes suspicious and brings us back to the fantastic track. Because it is in a genre that is horror. Because that one is in M. Night Shyamalan.

Taking two elderly people as a threat, the developer plays even more on the wire of uncertainty, as these figures are more exposed to disorders. So the scenario plays with the incontinence, mental disorder, by a black humour delicious. In addition to the horror, THE VISIT is a comedy film, shaking up her characters for our enjoyment. Has the image of this scene under the foundations of the house, where a game of hide-and-seek turns to horror before to conclude on a note of funny that leaves the viewer dazed as much as the two boys. Still, the night scenes are working fiendishly, although the basic ingredients are well known (jump-scare, the inputs/outputs of the framework, game on the out-of-field) but we are allowed to take in the game on our seat. In small malignant, it is on the daily that M. Night Shyamalan weaves the best cloth of the doubt, closing relentlessly on the viewer. The events of daily life become more suspicious because we do not expect that in the full light of day appears strange, as the film has taken care to install a binary rhythm where the night is the supernatural and the day the return of reason. The good idea is to go in search of unknown actors in the role of grand-parents that the children have never seen. More than the idea, the two actors are formidable, of ambiguity, of innocence and evil.

Under the frame of the film nestles a game on the film of Shyamalan in its entirety. Him, the producer of the item in the hidden, the one who believes in twists as a vehicle of pure fun film, employs multiple time of hidden things (that is there in the well ? And in the barn ? And in the basement ? And in the living room after dark ?). Where the cinema stood up then, generally, to an element-by-film, it varies the tracks in THE VISIT. Each of which is a possible answer to the final scene. If we did not fail to point the finger at how these mechanisms signatures he was caricatured, The Visit is a reminder that he knows how to wear a lucid and player on his own film.

“Shyamalan was not seen as inventive for many years !”

M. Night Shyamalan is a man who loves the fiction. The failed, but sincere The Girl of the Water exacerbated in a sort of mise en abîme his taste for the stories. In THE VISIT, the brothers take advantage of their stay to produce a short film, intended especially to their mother, who is in conflict with his own parents. It is a story with multiple layers. It was the film and the film within the film, plus another dimension added by the end, which will not be disclosed in those lines. During a wonderful time, Becca asks her grandmother, who refuses to talk about his daughter. To make him confess some of the things the young girl plate the story of his mother on a story imagined, a kind of fairy tale. Through this, she does say things to the old woman. The scene shows the power of fiction, by the invention, can out of each one. This is without counting on the perfidy of a Shyamalan unleashed, which by the end comes to spill the value of this scene. Imbued with a sense of humor that there had been little known as corrosive in him, it comes to paste on the before-last scene of the film, the music provided, to the base, by Becca as a “counterpoint” to his little film. It is close to the fiction for which he is the master by an innocent artistic approach provided by a protagonist. History of remember that it is the storyteller with total control. A hint of irony, tasty, proof that the man was not seen as inventive for years.

To deepen on the film of Shyamalan, we invite you to read an article dedicated to him on the occasion of the release of THE VISIT : The problem Shyamalan