The Visit follows siblings, Rebecca (Olivia DeJonge) and Tyler (Ed Oxenbould, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) as they are sent to not only stay with their mother's parents, but to actually meet them for the very first time. When their mother, Paula (Kathryn Hahn, Crossing Jordan) met and fell in love with their father, she left her parents' house after a major fight, and only recently has she allowed her estranged parents to communicate with her. Now, some 15 or so years later, Paula is once again single and her parents have started reaching out to her again. With some persuasion by her children, she agrees to let Rebecca and Tyler visit their grandparents for a week while Paula goes on a vacation with her new boyfriend.
It seems Rebecca, an aspiring filmmaker, has an ulterior motive though. Rebecca, with the help of her brother, decide to document the week-long experience, but Rebecca has decided that she will also get to the bottom of what happened all those years ago that split their mother's family apart. What neither Rebecca and Tyler expect is that their probing and documentation will unearth some rather odd behavior that their mother keeps attributing to her parents simply being old.
At first, Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie) seem pretty normal, but everything takes on a strange new appearance at night. Told that they should go to bed at 9:30 and they shouldn't leave their room at night, Rebecca and Tyler first make fun of the older duo, but when strange sounds outside of their room force them to take a peek, they observe Nana exhibiting very unusual behavior. While the days feel more normal, there are still a lot of little details going on with the older couple that just don't make sense, and with each day that passes, the kids grow more and more uneasy.
We found ourselves constantly trying to figure out what was really going on. Knowing this was a Shyamalan production, we came up with some pretty extreme and wild guesses, but I have to say, we didn't realize where the story was going until it was supposed to be revealed.
This Blu-ray is packaged with a DVD and digital copy of the movie, and it has a few special features. While there aren't a lot of extras, they are all good. The movie's Alternate Ending was interesting, but I preferred the one used, and while the deleted and extended scenes added a bit more detail to the overall picture, I don't think anything was really lost by having them taken out of the movie. There is also a photo gallery and a Making Of featurette.
The featurette is the extra that I found really interesting. It was mostly an interview with Shyamalan as he talked about going back to making a smaller, more intimate movie and really studying each choice to make sure it was what was right for the film. He said that this extra attention he put into the choices was for everything - the writing, the directing and even the more business side of movie-making. Quite frankly, I feel like it was those decisions to focus more on the details that make The Visit feel a lot more like his older titles than his more recent, and unsuccessful, films. Anyone looking for a solid thriller with some interesting characters and a good bit of strange comic relief should at least rent The Visit. It might just restore your faith in the movie-maker that created The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable.
