GRANDS, MAL

Opening this weekend:

The Visit—Recently I was reading a silly online list of pop-culture opinions—though the list referred to them as “pop-culture facts no one denies”—meant to be provocative. Number Six read: “The Village is a borderline excellent movie that would garner unanimous praise if it was M Night Shyamalan’s first film.”

“Unanimous” might be a bit much, but I quite agree that it’s at least borderline excellent, and I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who thinks so. I’m hoping for a critical rediscovery of that movie. The Village was, however, the only major break in Shyamalan’s streak of misfires and interesting failures since his triumph in 1999 with The Sixth Sense. Until now, that is.

Shyamalan’s latest, The Visit, is a “mockumentary,” and if you’re put off right away by the idea of sitting through another exercise in that overused device I don’t blame you. But it’s not oppressive here, in part because the cinematography, by Maryse Alberti, is rich and warm—the teenage heroine evidently has really good video cameras—and in part because said heroine gives her younger brother a second camera, so we get more than one angle.

Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and her brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) are sent by their divorced Mom (Kathryn Hahn) to visit her long-estranged parents in rural Pennsylvania while she goes on a cruise with her new boyfriend. Becca decides to shoot the visit, not only because she’s an aspiring filmmaker but because she’s hoping to get what she calls “The Elixir” for her Mom: A statement of conciliation from her parents for whatever it was that caused the falling-out back in the day.

Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop-Pop (Peter McRobbie) meet the kids at the train and take them to the handsome farmhouse where their Mom grew up. Their hosts are a charming old couple, but Pop-Pop warns them not to go in the cellar—because of the mold, he says—and to stay in their room after 9:30 p.m.

And thus, gradually, the creepy stuff starts. Nana and Pop-Pop alternate—one does something freaky, gross or inappropriate, and the other gently, soberly explains it to the kids as “sundowning” or whatever. The thriller pacing is expert, though on the “character” side of the writing there are some heavy-handed set-ups that are a little too pat in their payoffs. But we’re carried past this Afterschool Special dramaturgy by the acting, especially that of the lovely DeJonge and the hilarious, freestyling Oxenbould (both Australians, by the way).

It’s a nervy, imaginative gem of a horror picture, even better than David Robert Mitchell’s It Follows, which ran out of steam before the end. The Visit doesn’t—it steadily, cunningly builds, to a well-engineered twist and a hair-raising finale.

Best of all, unlike many contemporary horror pictures, The Visit is fun—Shyamalan’s touch here is playfully macabre, even scatological, and the audience responds with persistent giggles that are both nervous and genuine. As Nana explains, when Becca comes upon her having a laughing fit: “I have the Deep Darkies. You have to laugh, to keep the Deep Darkies in a cave.”

IT'LL SCRUNT YOUR GROWTH

With M. Night Shyamalan’s latest, The Visit, opening tomorrow…

Monster-of-the-Week: …the nod this week goes to...

…The Scrunt, the wolfish beast from Lady in the Water, Shyamalan’s uneven but interesting urban fairy tale of 2006.

CRASH BEHAVIOR

Most of the career of M. Night Shyamalan, director of After Earth, could be characterized as “After The Sixth Sense.” His work over the decade-plus since that 1999 ghost-story classic has largely been a string of interesting failures, except for 2010’s The Last Airbender, which wasn’t very interesting, and 2004’s The Village, which wasn’t a failure, though I’m apparently in the minority in that opinion.

Shyamalan is full of intriguing ideas, and he’s able to get terrific performances out of his actors. His troubles, at least in part, may have arisen because The Sixth Sense ended with a seamlessly-constructed surprise, and his subsequent films have almost all tried for a similar revelatory effect, with far less success. On the basis of one dazzling twist ending, he became known as the Twist Ending Guy, and he just wasn’t up to it.

His latest, After Earth, is no great shakes, but it has, at least, the virtue of being straightforward. Perhaps because he was principally a hired gun here—the script is by Gary Whitta and Shyamalan, from a story conceived by star and executive producer Will Smith—Shyamalan doesn’t bust a gut trying to blow our minds.

As with so many of his films, After Earth has a laborious-to-explain backstory. Here goes: Having trashed Earth by about the middle of this century, humans abandon it for a new planet called Nova Prime. An alien race resents the invasion, and releases hideous creatures called “Ursas,” who are eyeless but able to track humans through the pheromones we secrete when afraid, and who have the charming habit of impaling their victims on tree branches, like shrikes. The Ursas are foiled, about a thousand years from now, by a stalwart Supreme Commander named Cypher Raige (Will Smith) who learns to battle them without fear, a technique he calls “ghosting.”

All of this is prologue, and as contrived as it sounds (and is) it really just amounts to an overcomplicated set-up for a boy’s-book adventure. As soon as After Earth gets going as such, it’s watchable and reasonably exciting.

The story proper centers on Cypher’s teenage son Kitai (Jaden Smith), who has a distant relationship with his famous father, linked to a shared tragedy. When the spaceship on which they’re traveling crashes on the now-uninhabited Earth, and Cypher is too badly injured to walk, Kitai must make his way, with his father coaching him, to another piece of the wreck, miles away, to send a distress signal.

His father tells him that all the life forms on Earth have evolved to kill humans—odd, since it’s only been a thousand years—and Kitai does indeed encounter souped-up versions of baboons, raptors, tigers and other creatures. He’s also stalked by an Ursa that was aboard the spaceship (being transported for training purposes) and has escaped.

Except in its opening quarter, and a few flashbacks and dream sequences, the movie is essentially a two-character play. The dialogue given to Will Smith is in a stiffly military idiom, and he plays it very straight, but skillfully. Jaden Smith, rightly top-billed, has a little trouble with his diction, but as in the Karate Kid remake in 2010, he has a touchingly vulnerable-looking physicality, and his put-upon facial expressions are amusing.

The theme of After Earth—that “danger is very real, but fear is a choice”—is problematic. It’s expressed by Cypher in a showcase monologue, in which he describes realizing, in a life-or-death moment, that his fear was a fantasy, based on a story he was telling himself about the future. I would point out that the physiological symptoms of fear usually are not a choice, and that they’re just as “real” as, say, the tornado or the charging lion that causes them. More importantly, fear isn’t always debilitating; sometimes it’s lifesaving, as Liam Neeson’s character pointed out in the similarly-themed (though much less pleasant) film The Grey.

I don’t think this is hair-splitting. I think misunderstanding this point—confusing caution with paralysis—is what leads to stupidly reckless risks, especially by the young. Bravery isn’t about suppressing fear, it’s about acting, when necessary, in spite of fear. Besides, most threats to life and limb aren’t like the Ursas—they can still see and smell (and taste) you whether you’re afraid of them or not. Lack of fear in the face of legitimate danger really should be called “ghosting,” because it can quickly make you into a ghost.

THE NORMAN HEART

Out on DVD today: The excellent little stop-motion-animated kiddie-spooker ParaNorman.

It starts with the same premise as The Sixth Sense—a little boy who sees dead people. It’s up to Norman to figure out the secret that raises six rotted corpses from their graves and sends them shambling through the streets of the small town where he lives. The movie is imaginative, generous-hearted and funny, though with a surprisingly dramatic and poignant revelation at its core. Best of all, it avoids the sterility that haunts so many contemporary animated movies—Norman’s home town has a grubby, hardscrabble look, like a shop town down on its luck, that’s very refreshing.