Family Gravity in The Visit
Universal Pictures
When we heard about the exclusive premiere, we knew it was because our professor was connected, sought out, an icon in horror film academia. Our senior year of college, my friend Natalie and I were taking a class on horror film. Our professor told us how she’d heard from a film studio about an early release of the new M. Night Shyamalan film, and, like most of the class, we knew we had to go. We invited our friends and showed up to the local theater on a Thursday night, our beloved professor at the helm, only asking that everyone share a thumbs up or down on their way out for studio feedback. For a couple of weeks, we’d been studying films that had made it. Now we were part of it.
The film was The Visit. Siblings Tyler and Becca are sent to their grandparents’ farmhouse in Pennsylvania for a weeklong visit while their single mother, Loretta (Kathryn Hahn), goes on a cruise with her boyfriend.
The movie is composed of found footage; Becca wants to make a documentary about their mother’s story as a gift for her, with the hopes that it could mend Loretta’s relationship with her parents. The film opens with an interview with their mother. At the end of high school, Loretta fell in love with a substitute teacher and had two kids, then he fell in love with someone who worked at Starbucks and left their Pennsylvania home for California. Becca asks about what happened the day Loretta left home as a teenager, and Loretta is cagey. Things escalate. She says, “it ended one afternoon very badly. I left at nineteen, haven’t spoken to my parents in fifteen years.” Becca tries to coax her out, but her mother is reticent. “I did something I choose not to tell you, if they choose to tell you, that’s their right.”
On the hunt for “the elixir” of forgiveness, Becca enlists Tyler’s help to capture the details of their trip, culminating in interviews with their grandparents. With The Visit’s found footage coming from two teenagers’ home videos, the film is lovably playful. When the train conductor and a concerned neighbor realize they’re making a movie, they wax nostalgic about bygone theater days. There’s no nondiegetic music, so we experience the delights and terrors of the grandparents’ Pennsylvania farmhouse alongside Becca and Tyler.
The camera bears witness to their retracing of their mother’s first life. They’re curious about all she left behind––the clock she’d watch tick as she planned her escape for the night, how she’d play hide and seek under the house. Becca instructs Tyler to look for visual tension, things beyond the camera that pull our focus.
Quickly, this tension emerges. When Becca and Tyler play hide and seek below the house, Nana bullets after them like an angry mama bear, emerging after with a cackle—she got them good—and a butt cheek is exposed from the slip in her skirt. Tyler, a germaphobe, finds soiled diapers hidden in the shed. Strange noises—scraping, scratching, shrieking, vomiting—echo beyond their bedroom door after 9:30 pm. The Visit blends familiar fairy tale motifs with perhaps the most self-awareness seen in a Shyamalan film.
Years before, my friends and I had watched Devil, which is about a group of people who get stuck in an elevator and one of them is the devil. So self-serious, so bad, it was the perfect drinking game, as so many of his films are.
The Visit, however, leans into the humor, though many of the laughs are at the grandparents’ expense—they’re old, old people get confused. And suddenly, when trouble ratchets up, we realize how serious this story has been all along.
My friends and I emerged with thumbs up, though we weren’t really sure what had happened. In class, we discussed how aware of itself the film seemed to be.
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Whenever we bring up the future—possibilities for when I’m out of grad school, where all of our family might end up in more permanent times—my mom talks about her upbringing. Born in the Bronx to Italian-American parents, she grew up with a collection of cousins. Her whole family moved up the Hudson, and she could walk to her grandparents’ house. Every birthday was cause for a family celebration.
When I was growing up, we’d make the trip to New York to visit my grandparents every three weeks or so, arriving in time for cold cut sandwiches on Saturday and leaving after church and my grandmother’s meatballs and red sauce (we call it gravy) on Sunday. I always loved these visits.
But now, the talk of considering somewhere permanent still sets me on edge. Did I become the black sheep at some point? Enjoying the ability to visit and then slip back into my life, a short flight away?
Underneath its humor and horror, The Visit tells the story of a family wound, one that Loretta and her parents seemingly cannot talk about. Only once Becca and Tyler’s lives are at risk does the truth emerge.
This isn’t unusual for horror films—after the chronic problem has been addressed, the monster evaporates. But bolstered by the mission of the documentary within the movie, we realize how important this rift has been all along. The film packs in all sorts of horror devices—abjection, a disgust and unease towards aging—all to ruminate on this anxiety about family. When we’ve orbited out of the core family’s gravity, what pains will it take to realign?
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Last week, on my spring break from school, I went to Maine to meet my now one-month old niece. For days, we sat around the house, lounging on a binge of The Office and Abbott Elementary while we kept watch. I helped my sister with baby duty when her husband went back to work on Monday.
Before graduate school, I’d lived in this city, and since, my sister has moved here too. Coming back weeks before my thesis defense, I feel that the return is palpable. I could be back at these same restaurants with my friends, coming over to cook dinner and give my sister and brother-in-law a break. Maybe the decision isn’t so black-and-white, about permanently being a leaver or a stayer. Who can say what the future might look like? But maybe one day my niece will love horror films like the rest of us. She can watch The Visit and reenact the jokes when her uncle comes to visit.
