The Visit (2015) * 1/2

Directed by:  M. Night Shyamalan

Starring:  Kathryn Hahn, Peter McRobbie, Ed Oxenbould, Olivia DeJonge, Deanna Dunagan

The Visit depends on a lot of contrivance and character stupidity to keep its plot creaking along.     Writer-director M. Night Shyamalan does indeed revert to the Big Reveals of his earlier films, but even after this happens, the kids still stay in the house!!     Maybe Eddie Murphy was onto something thirty-plus years ago when he said, "Why don't white people just get out of the house?"     He could have been talking about The Visit.  

The plot of The Visit begins with one of the two main teenage characters, Becca (DeJonge) filming a documentary of some sort.    Her mother (Hahn) is the interview subject and she discusses how she angrily left her parents' home in rural Pennsylvania when she was 19 and hasn't talked to them since.     Out of the blue, her parents contact her and express a desire to see their grandchildren whom they have never met.     Mom books them on the first train to Masonville, PA to see their grandparents while she goes on a cruise for the week.     This conveniently gets mom out of the way for most of the story.

Becca and her younger brother Tyler (Oxenbould) insist on bringing the camera along to document their journey.     This stylistic device (first made popular in The Blair Witch Project) is distracting and so played out.     I always wonder who is holding the camera or when the camera is being held.     We know the camera's only true function is to pick up spooky doings with unrealistic clarity.     My guess is Shyamalan wrote this film around the time of The Sixth Sense and let it sit and gather dust in the bottom of a desk drawer.

The teens arrive in Masonville where there is perpetual snow on the ground and there only appears to be three or four other residents.     The grandparents' farmhouse is conveniently located in the middle of nowhere.     Grandmother bakes and cooks all day long while grandfather does nothing farming related except throw around bales of hay.    Grandfather tells the children never to go in the basement and bedtime is 9:30pm sharp.     Why not just wear a shirt that says, "I'm hiding something."?

The kids naturally venture out of their bedroom and observe very strange behavior from Grandmother, including projectile vomiting, running around and crawling on the floor naked, and scratching the walls.     Grandfather insists her behavior is caused by dementia and sundowning, (meaning extreme emotional reactions to nightfall).     Grandfather is not without his issues either.     He hides things in the shed and what he hides is rather gross.     But, I'll leave it for you to discover.

The Visit plods along at a snail's pace.    The teens are also peculiar in their own way.     Tyler frequently performs raps.    The movie stops dead so he can perform a couple of them.     Becca is so wise and thoughtful beyond her years that the only way to account for this is that she read the screenplay.     The dialogue is awkward.      The people, even the kids, act strange.    Only the grandparents are expected to, given the plot.     There is even a Sarah McLachlan reference.    Sarah McLachlan?     What year was this written again?    I assume it takes place in the present day, but other aspects of the film seem dated.  

There are so many things that conveniently do not work or people conveniently absent in order for the kids to feel trapped and isolated.      The wi-fi doesn't work.    The cell phones do not receive good service.      The local police are always out on patrol and never in the office.      Did these kids ever hear of 911?    Did anyone in the movie?    They're in Pennsylvania, not Siberia.     Then comes the Big Reveal, which accounts for the grandparents' odd behavior, but the kids keep themselves in danger by NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE.     They stay.    Becca even abides by the old lady's wishes by going all the way inside the oven to clean it.     She does this twice in the movie, by the way.    The kids even stick around long enough to play Yahtzee with the old couple, thus keeping themselves in harm's way.     And yes, there are gruesome things in the basement.    

All of this reaches an unsatisfactory payoff and a moral of "let go of your anger" or something like that.     There was a moral to this silliness?     Shyamalan hit big in 1999 with The Sixth Sense and followed up with 2000's Unbreakable, which was pretty good.     After that, his quality trajectory has gone straight down.      We endured Signs, The Village, The Lady in the Water, and The Happening since then.     I did not see The Last Airbender or After Earth and I don't plan to.     He goes back to his roots sort of with The Visit, but it is bogged down by such absurdity that we just don't care anymore.