The Visit

I had very mixed feelings about even going to see this movie.  M. Night Shyamalan has tricked me (and so many others) into seeing quite a few bad films.  I was 14 when The Village came out, and I was so excited to see it.  But the ending was so drab.  After that his films just seemed to plummet further.  And then we have this.

This is a campy self-aware faux horror documentary from the perspective of teenagers.  Also (see above) they case actual teenagers, which does wonders for the film.  It's the sort of weird, funny little film I'd expect to see to a newcomer to the genre.  It's the sort of film you see and think "it has it's issues, but I feel like this director has promise".  Which makes the fact that it was made by a big budget, almost universally panned director confusing.

It's a surprisingly ballsy film.  It's a slow burn, taking advantage of "old people are just weird" for as long as possible.  It's filled with weird half-explanations that would genuinely be believable to the teenage main characters.  And it has a twist that I at least did not see coming (I knew there would be a twist of course, but I didn't think it would be what it was).

It struck me as honest in a way I rarely see.  The main characters are irritating and lovable, and really work as actual teenagers.  The older daughter sees herself as very grown up and cultured, she wants to make this a poignant documentary about the family she's never known, tying it into her mother's past and her present in a way that creates meaning for herself and her whole family.  But of course, she's a teenager, so she's often really bad at it (though she is treated to a few touching scenes).  She's a very believable 17 year old girl.

The brother, 13, is a tiny puffed up cultural appropriating, misogynistic little asshole.  But it's completely obvious that he is the way he is because he's trying to compensate for his father's disappearance, for his scrawny frame, for his awkwardness.  He's lovable because he has absolutely no idea what he's doing.  He's probably the most believable teenage boy I've seen in a movie in years.

And the core family: brother, sister & mother... they really love each other.  They fight and make mistakes just like normal people, but they're a good, loving family.  The sister calls the brother out on his misogynistic bullshit, the brother gets the sister to take him more seriously, and the mother is hopelessly confused by the world that is adulthood but loves & protects her children as best she can.  It's a shockingly positive depiction of a single-parent family.

When we get to the meat of the movie it's uneven.  There are both laughs & jump scares.  But I'd say it's closer to a comedy than a horror film.  The self-awareness helps a lot to mitigate this though.  It's solid entertainment, with interesting "villians" and a commitment to the realism of it's heroes (though significantly less commitment to the realism of Nana and Pop Pop).

Were this a movie by a director new to the scene, it would be easier to praise it, to call it daring and funny, to give it a B+.  But while Shyamalan has made a significantly better film here than he has in more than a decade, I still don't think he deserves a newbie bonus. 

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Entertaining 4/5        Intelligent 2/5        Unsettling 3.5/5
 
 Scary 3/5        Gory 1/5        Funny 5/5         Artistic 2/5
  

Representation of Minorities 0/5        Representation of Women 4/5
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Dark Skies

I have been waiting for a good alien horror movie for a while now.  It was such a trope in the 90s & early 00s, with Signs being the last good thing M. Night Shyamalan ever did (thus ruining Night as a badass middle name forever).  

But I digress.

This is a very solid movie.  It's suspenseful, and the jump scares worked well (at least on me).  It kept the tension high by keeping the antagonists of the film in the shadows.  So many modern horror movies try to scare you with brightly lit, finely detailed creatures.  While often these are beautifully constructed, they're never as terrifying as something you can just barely see in the dark.

The film stars a young couple and their two young boys.  It fails the Bechtel test spectacularly, managing to have three named female characters who never speak to each other about anything but their (inevitably all male) families.  It's a straight up old fashioned maternal tale, with a mother who turns to odd explanations and a father who is prone to violent & aggressive outbursts.  This makes a very convenient excuse for why people are suspicious of these folks.  They're also solidly upper-middle class, behind on their mortgage due to the father's layoff from a major firm, being supported by the mother, who lets her maternal instincts get in the way of her doing her job as a real estate agent.  Falling back on these tropes is, to say the least, less than ideal.

In spite of all this, I have to admit the movie is very successful.  It has jumps and bumps in all the right places.  There's paranoia, social rejection and blackouts.  There are creepy kids and sleepwalking.  There are conveniently blurred security videos, though (thank god) it is not a found footage film.  It has a lot of traditional horror aspects, and really brilliantly blends them together into something that feels coherent.  That's not easy to do.

The oldest son is the most dimensional character, followed by his mother.  He's young and naive and believes pornography is a representation of how dating actually works and has an older friend who's not a good influence.  In spite of their stereotypes the actors still manage to pull off seeming like a real, if troubled, suburban family.

Is this movie groundbreaking?  No.  Did it successfully evoke emotion towards it's main characters, build suspense and then make me jump out of my seat?  It most certainly did.

Housebound

I feel like I've been waiting for this movie a long time.  Not only in the sense that I missed it when it came (very briefly) through my local movie theater, but also in the sense that it's a horror film which manages to be genuinely scary and genuinely funny.

The main character, Kylie, starts off the movie with a botched attempt to rob an ATM.  It's the kind of everything-goes-wrong crime that'd get you put in prison in the United States for 5-10 years, but thankfully this movie is from New Zealand, so Kylie gets put under house arrest instead.  She's a total brat, and acts just like a teenage girl who hates her parents and has been literally locked in with them.  Which is to say she's not a terribly likeable character initially.

Kylie's mum thinks the house is haunted, something the young criminal initially scoffs at.  However, she quickly changes her tune when creepy things start happening around the house.  This, of course, leads to shenanigans involving the security guy who is assigned to Kylie's ankle bracelet.

I don't want to spoil the film, so I won't go too much further into it, but you'll scream, you'll laugh, you'll cower behind the covers.  It's that sort of movie.  It's full of unexpected plot twists and has about an equal number of surprise laughs as surprise screams.

It's important to note that none of these laughs are unintentional, or the result of plotholes or poor movie making.  A lot of the humor surrounds the tensions between mother & daughter, and through the film both of them grow on you.

The film passes the betchel test with flying colors, with two of the three main characters being women.  We have one main character who is a person of color (and is in many ways more a main character than the mother) which is nice.  There are no romantic plotlines of any nature, which I appreciated.  And best of all it's just a genuinely good horror-comedy.

5/5

I love this film.