Chas’ blog ~ The Visit
I’ve been looking forward to M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit for weeks. Shyamalan suffers a lot from the Orson Welles: his first film is great and everything that comes afterward is compared unfavourably with it.
The Visit looks like a return to form for Shyamalan who has complained about lack of control over the final cut. This film was self-financed by the writer/director and shot in and around his home in Pennsylvania.
In the past he has done cameos in his films, and in The Visit executive producers Steven Schneider and Ashwin Rajan appear as characters in the film.
The poster is wonderful; an embroidered stitch-work pattern on a cotton background and the words (Grandma’s rules) are like a transformation of something out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The third rule (Don’t ever leave your room after 9:30pm) strikes a resonant chord with my childhood memories of Nelson when there was a 9:30pm curfew signaled by a horn blast from the firehall on Ward Street. The depiction of what appear to be bloody fingerprints on the two sides of the picture add just a nice (if you will forgive me) gruesome touch to the presentation.
When I was a teenager, two of my favourite writers were Edgar Allen Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle who were known for the elements of horror in their stories. This film might take me back and I wonder if this might be part of Shyamalan’s design. The words above the film’s title (an original thriller from writer/director M.N.S….) suggest to me that he is proud of this project or that it firmly bears the stamp of his art, so I, for one, am really looking forward to seeing it.
Parenthetically, the Wikipedia article on this film calls it “a found footage horror comedy film.” This refers to “a plot device in pseudo-documentaries in which all or a substantial part of a fictional film is presented as if it were discovered films or video recordings.” Shyamalan has admitted that he had trouble getting the tone for the film that he ultimately wanted during the editing process, and it required a third cut before he was satisfied with the results.
More about The Visit:
http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YfQnRjkuvaY
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Visit_(2015_film)
fandango.com/thevisit2015_180875/movieoverview
rottentomatoes.com/m/the_visit_2015
movieinsider.com/m12732/the-visit/#plot
metacritic.com/movie/the-visit
Charles Ward has loved movies all his life. He can remember when a quarter (25 cents) was enough for a Saturday matinee and popcorn.
