Michael Medved reviews the latest Shyamalan movie, ‘The Visit’
Sep 11, 2015, 5:45 AM | Updated: 1:29 pm
M. Night Shyamalan may have brought us chilling hits in the past, but Michael Medved says his latest offering, "The Visit" fails on so many levels. (AP)
(AP)
Michael Medved’s movie review taken from Friday’s edition of Seattle’s Morning News on KIRO Radio.
M. Night Shyamalan may have brought us chilling hits in the past, but his latest offering, “The Visit,” fails on so many levels.
This is one of the worst movies of the year. It is excruciating to watch and you feel sorry for everyone involved with it. You wonder what M. Knight is thinking.
This film is just skillful enough to be disturbing without being really scary. All the thrills are really cheap thrills.
“The Visit” is about two kids — one is 12 and the other is 9 — and they are making a documentary about a visit to their grandparents, who they have no recollection of meeting. The grandparents are estranged from their single mother and there are flashbacks and references to something terrible that happened between their mother and their grandparents. Now they are going to spend a week with them on a farm in Pennsylvania.
Creepy things are happening at this farm.
This is a director I like and care about because he’s done wonderful movies, in my opinion. I’m a big fan of three of his earlier movies, not just because of “The Sixth Sense,” which was a smash hit. But also “Signs,” which was genuinely chilling and fascinating. It is one of the better alien movies, ever. And I loved a movie he did called “The Village.” Again, a movie with a surprise twist. And there is a twist in this movie, but it comes too late.
The surprise makes no sense. That’s what has been terrific about M. Knight’s other movies; there is a surprise and everything you’ve seen up to then makes sense in a different way. In “The Visit,” it makes no sense.
The movie also treats mental illness in a way that is beyond demeaning.
One of the things that is evil in the movie is a focus on how one of the main characters is incontinent. And there is an obsession about what happens to the adult diapers. At one point, the results of the incontinence and the adult diapers are pressed into someone’s face. That is the level of what we are dealing with in this movie.
I’ll give “The Visit” one star because there are enough shocks and things jumping out of closets, but it stays at that level.
It’s rated an absurd PG-13, but should be rated 100 percent R.
Michael Medved’s movie review taken from Friday’s edition of Seattle’s Morning News on KIRO Radio.
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