M. Night Shyamalan is hot or miss for me. I've liked most of his movies, but sometimes he gets too far up his own ass and his movies suffer for it. I liked "The Village," though, and "Lady in the Water," and most people didn't like those movies, so I'm thinking I might like this one too. I tried to ignore the negative reviews for this movie and decided I would make up my own mind about it when I saw it. Looks like that will be today! Here goes nothing!
This movie is about a girl named Becca and her younger brother Tyler who wave goodbye to their mother and hop on a train to go visit their grandma and grandpa in Pennsylvania for the first time ever. their grandparents live deep in Pennsylvania farm country, so deep that their cellphones don't even get reception way out at their grandparents house. Their nana and pop-pop seem to welcome them at first, and they tell their mother that they're having a great time, but soon they begin to notice increasingly strange behavior from their grandparents, and when they discover a shocking secret about the couple, they begin to wonder if they're ever going to make it home again. Ooh, spooky.
if there's one criticism I could level against M. Night Shyamalan, it's that he loves his third-act twists, and sometimes he loves his twenty minutes of twists so much that he forgets the other eighty minutes of his movies are important too. I wonder what the twist will be in this movie? While we're waiting for the twist, the actors are doing a good job making me care about the characters. I actually like Becca and Tyler, though they don't seem to want to respect their grandparent's rules about going to bed and not leaving their rooms after nine, and I have a feeling bad things are going to happen to them for ignoring that rule.
I'll tell you one thing that surprised me, no one ever told me this was a found footage type movie (I avoided spoilers like the plague, so no one told me anything about this movie, really, but I was surprised to see the shaky handheld camerawork because the whole point of this movie, in Becca's mind, is to get her grandparents back into a relationship with her mother). They've been estranged for years after their mother left home to be with the man she loved. That's a sad story, and it adds pathos to the film. Once the plot twist happens, everything starts to happen very quickly, though the characters don't listen to me while I was yelling at the screen telling them what to do (they never listen to me...sometimes I have good ideas). All in all this was a good movie that's not just about the twist, because there's plot development both before and after the twist that works for me. I ended up really liking this one.
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