Trap

Parent

Trap
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
UK/Yemen/USA 2024
Blinding Edge Productions
UK cinema cut.

Warning: Spoilers from the trailer.

I have to say that, the older I get, the more I am mellowing towards M. Night Shyamalan. He’s much easier to stomach when he’s not exploring stories which lead to an obviously telegraphed ending and, with a film like this, he really knows how to pull all the stops out and craft a tale of downright gripping suspense, it has to be said.

Trap is about a family man parent called Cooper, played by Josh Hartnett... an actor I’ve always liked and who is playing a little against type here (at least in terms of the other films I’ve seen with him). He’s attending a rock concert put on by Lady Raven, played by M. Night Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan (not his other daughter, who directed the excellent The Watched, reviewed here).* Turns out that Saleka is not just a talented actress as she demonstrates here (especially in the last act of the movie) but she also composed and performs the many songs she sings, plays and dances her way through as Lady Raven so, yeah, a Hollywood family to take note of.

Okay, so Cooper is there with his daughter, played by Ariel Donoghue but, he’s very worried about the high police presence in and around the building. So he talks to a merchandise stall person and it turns out that the whole concert is one big trap to catch a violent serial killer known as The Butcher, since the police know he likes this particular artist. And if you’re thinking of seeing this one and you haven’t seen the trailer then... don’t read on. Big spoiler. And if you have seen the trailer you’ll know that the set up for the movie is... Cooper is The Butcher. So the first two thirds of the movie are Cooper trying to figure out how to get out of the trap and see what lengths he’ll go to in order to escape.

Also present at the concert and spearheading the operation is criminal profiler Dr. Josephine Grant (I do wonder if that character name is a deliberate Doctor Who reference) and she’s played by none other than the great Hayley Mills. Yeah, that’s right... the star of The Parent Trap sets a trap for a serial killing parent. That has a nice sense of poetic career continuity.

And, for those of you who know Shyamalan’s work you’ll already know it’s well shot and, especially in the interior scenes that don’t take place at the concert, beautifully framed. But, if you want a good thing to recommend this movie to you... it’s that it doesn’t, quite, do what you expect it to. I mean, yeah, there’s no big twist in the tale (so to speak) but the basic set up of ‘man needs to get out of trap’ does not take up the whole movie. It does some other, sometimes surprising things which, actually, hinge on the credibility of Saleka Shyamalan’s Lady Raven character. This film kinda holds its credibility on whether, through that performance, you think the character is capable of reacting to the situation in the way she does and, I have to tell you, she pulls it off surprisingly well here. There are a few false endings popping up like Russian nesting dolls and I was happily convinced by it the whole time.

So, yeah, the only other thing worth mentioning about Trap, well... other than it’s a very Hitchcockian time at the cinema, is that I suspect, although it’s not verified in this particular film, that it could well be another stealth installment in the Unbreakable series of films by the same director. I mean, it’s definitely set up for a sequel and I can’t help but think Cooper might well meet one or two of the characters from Glass (reviewed here) before long. So time will tell on that one, I guess.

*And, yes, the director does put himself in a little role in the movie again. You really can’t miss him.

Old

Life’s A Beach

Old
USA 2021
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Universal Pictures 

Warning: Very minor spoilers which are probably in the trailer.

I usually don’t get on all that well with the films of M. Night Shyamalan. He’s obviously very talented but I find the majority of his films (I curiously have actually seen the majority of them) either way too obvious from the start or just with lousy endings. It’s been said he makes extended The Twilight Zone episodes and that’s not a bad analogy... but without the punch of some of the old TV show, I think. However, that being said, I really liked three of his previous movies... Unbreakable, Lady In The Water (which it seems nobody except me liked) and Devil (which he wrote but didn’t direct). Well, finally, we can add another movie I really responded to with his new film, Old.

Old is based on a graphic novel called Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. I’ll do my usual here and say that I can’t tell you how good or respectful of an adaptation it is because I’ve not read it... but, love him or hate him, Shyamalan is such a powerful artist that I’m guessing there’s a lot of his personal stamp on this.

The film starts off with a husband and wife, Guy and Prisca, played by Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, who are taking their son and daughter for a three day holiday in a luxury resort before breaking the news to them that Prisca wants to separate from her husband and, also, that she has a tumor growing which may threaten her life. Then, on the second day, they along with a few other couples and families are offered a day on the special, secret beach by the resort manager. However, when they enter the beach, they find they can’t leave it without blacking out and that... everybody has started ageing at an accelerated rate. Their new mission is to find a way off the beach before they die or succumb to various illnesses (which amounts to the same thing). It’s said the director was also inspired by Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and that kinda makes sense, although there’s a very real reason why the people here can’t leave the beach, rather than the social politeness which strands them in a place for weeks because they don’t want to be the first to leave, like in the Buñuel movie.

That’s the set up and, although that’s really all I will tell of the story, there’s actually not much I could reveal anyway in the way of spoilers. This one’s strength is that there’s no big twist to the plot. Everything is in the opening pitch, so the film doesn’t set itself up for a disappointment. However, if you are watching attentively, you will get wind of the other, side mystery fairly quickly. As soon as the family arrive at the resort and are given special cocktails and food based on their requirements, you probably know something’s up. Then, when the ‘driver’, played by the director of the movie in yet another one of his extended cameos at the start and end of the picture, gives them all too much food to take with them and refuses to actually take them onto the beach himself, you will know that something sinister is afoot. I’m glad to say though, even despite recent world events which should have tipped me off, that this minor mystery side helping of “Why?” was a surprise but made perfect sense when you get to the end of the movie. And at no point is the actual mystery of the beach explained as anything other than a naturally occurring phenomenon that just ‘is’... which is nice.

The film is slowly paced and it’s just right for this kind of material, as the characters gradually struggle to make sense of their situation. The director also makes some nice choices by choosing to highlight the artificiality of the resort hotel when the actors inhabit that space, as a counterpoint to the majority of the story being set on a stretch of open beach. For example, there’s a wonderful shot near the start where we are looking in at the main characters from outside the windows of the hotel room and the windows consist of vertical slats making big rectangles in which Shyamalan can compartmentalise the mother, father and the children. The camera slowly tracks back and forth outside these windows and then, on the third pass, we have Vicky Krieps head in close up suddenly looming into the shot as she has moved out onto the balcony when the camera was busy tracking the other way. It’s a really nice moment and a wonderful use of space and camera movement. I was very impressed with this shot, probably more than anything else in the film and I don’t mean that to the detriment of the remainder of the movie at all.

The film starts off as the usual 'family flung into a situation they need to overcome' but, as more people give in to various afflictions and consequences of the unnatural ageing of their bodies, the film takes on the sinister aspect of a horror film and, due to the seemingly supernatural properties of the beach, I am certainly tempted to call this one a horror movie. There are two spectacular ‘kills’ towards the end of the movie which certainly pack a punch... one involving the breaking and healing of limbs while the other involves a rusty knife. It’s all good stuff and certainly gives the film an edge to it.

Also, the actors in this are all great and there are some good people here other than the main leads... including the likes of Rufus Sewell, Emun Elliott, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Francesca Eastwood (daughter of Clint, it turns out). And one of the strengths of the movie is that, for the most part, the characters they play are mostly likeable so, when the horror element starts to creep in, you are really hoping these people will survive.

The film also has an effective score by Trevor Gureckis which starts off pretty minimally at first but kicks in at the appropriate times later in the film when called for. Alas, there’s been no proper CD release so I guess I won’t be hearing that score separate from the movie any time soon.

My first real criticism is that one of the people on the beach who has been on there a lot longer than the others seems to show no real sign of ageing (which makes you think something else may be happening) and the relative ages of various characters can be hard to keep in your head because, as in real life, people age at different rates. The explanation about the lack of growth of hair and fingernails is gotten out of the way fairly early on though (or I might have been worrying about that issue for a bit). The other problem I had was that the ‘justice is served’ style conclusion to the movie seemed a trifle optimistic in terms of expecting authority figures like the police buying into the concept behind the film but, well, sometimes you have to go the ‘shorthand’ route rather than waste another ten minutes of film to make a point, I would guess. And that really isn’t a spoiler about the conclusion of the movie, by the way... but I just can’t say why.

Other than that, though, I’m absolutely delighted that, with Old, I’m finally able to get behind an M. Night Shyamalan movie again. This is one I will actually be grabbing on Blu Ray at some point because I think my parents might like this one... despite the fact that it does tend towards the very grim by the end of the film. There’s a lot to like in this and the director does a really good job with it. I may read the graphic novel at some point, I think. 

Glass

Glass Action

Glass
2019 USA
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
UK cinema release print.

Well this is somewhat disappointing, it has to be said.

I have a kind of love/hate relationship going with the films directed by M. Night Shyamalan. As a director I think he’s brilliant... able to tell his stories with a visual simplicity that communicates his intentions very quickly and easily. Alas... the stories themselves are generally very predictable... ranging to about 10 - 20 minutes into The Sixth Sense before you can easily figure out the ‘twist’, right the way through the ‘obvious scale’ of... at the start of the second camera shot in The Village, which immediately gives away the ending of that movie. I think the only time he ever really caught me out... and it’s a good thing when he does, by the way... was with Unbreakable, where the slight twist of Mr. Glass turning out to be a super villain actually hadn’t occurred to me. Consequently, Unbreakable has always been the film which I have held in the highest regard of his films (that and Devil which, ironically, he only wrote and didn’t direct himself).

Alas, the stealth sequel to Unbreakable released a couple of years ago, Split (reviewed here), which only revealed itself to be such during the cameo of Bruce Willis for the last few seconds of the post-credits scene... while having amazing central performances by Anya-Taylor Joy and James MacAvoy... was somehow pretty mediocre, I thought, in terms of the story. However, at least that one did right by the characters these two played. When both these two return with their characters in Glass, I dunno, it felt like they’d lost something in translation and become more cardboard in their intent as merely ‘story functions’ as opposed to three dimensional characters. And I don’t believe that’s due to the performances, because they are still excellent. I think it’s either due to the writing being somewhat less willing to explore what’s going on in their heads or, just as likely, that a lot of footage was cut, which may well have been character building stuff (I understand the first cut of this, like most movies, was a lot longer that the final release print).

They are joined, of course, by Bruce Willis reprising the central superhero character and Samuel L. Jackson as super-villain Mr. Glass. Both are excellent but Willis’ understated character seems a little too subtle here, I felt. He’s probably the least interesting character in the movie and comes off the worst of the three. Jackson’s Mr. Glass, on the other hand, seems to be the only one in the film who really sticks to his guns, so to speak, and really resembles the character he played in Unbreakable but... yeah, at the end of the day, all these characters are kind of wasted, in my opinion, in an endgame by the director which probably isn’t going to be a crowd pleaser when it comes to fans of the series as a whole, I suspect.

They are also joined by Spencer Treat Clark (still playing Bruce Willis’ son in the 19 years since the first movie), Charlayne Woodard  (reprising her role as Samuel L. Jackson’s mother, even though she is younger than him in real life, I believe) and Sarah Paulson as the psychiatrist who is seen to be trying to cure the three main protagonists/antagonists from what they are supposed to believe is a delusion of their super powers.

Shyamalan also makes a cameo appearance playing the same character he played in Unbreakable and, it turns out, also the same character he played in Split. So that must be an unusual film statistic, to have the director play the same cameo character three times in three different movies. Has anybody else done this? He also puts in flashback scenes from footage that didn’t make it into Unbreakable (much the same way as Coscarelli does in some of his Phantasm films) so that’s kind of a nice thing to do.

Once again, though, the director puts things across very nicely visually but, I think, his strength is also his weakness because the way he positions certain characters in the spotlight means he gives the game away far too soon. In this case, when I saw the trailers for Glass I was pretty sure there was going to be a twist ending (of sorts) and I was pretty sure I could tell from the promotions what that reveal would be. Alas, it’s even more obvious in the movie which, actually, starts out really well but when a certain character shows up very early on, you know something fishy is going on right from the start. Just as you know that, despite appearing to be a vegetable for the first half of the movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s character already has his brain working so he can stay one step ahead of the so called ‘twist’ before it, eventually, happens at the end of the film. And that’s pretty much the main reason, I think, why I’m so down about this movie. I was looking forward to something at least worthy of the original film and, instead, we have something which really isn’t even as good as Split.

The other thing is that the sleight of hand of a big, final showdown of the movie is teased but never used and that’s a deliberate mechanism of the plot... fair enough. However, it also sets the audience up, in an age of very good superhero movies dominating the International Box Office receipts, for a big ‘final fight’ when, in fact, we’ve already witnessed it... we just didn’t know it yet. Glass finishes with a bit of a damp squib of an ending and, although the implications of the very last scene are quite a nice thing to end on in some ways, I just felt like the writer had betrayed the characters in the original movies and pulled the rug from under the audience when, it has to be said, the audience wasn’t even standing there anymore... they’d mostly all figured it all out from either the trailer or from very early on in the movie. So, yeah, a less than satisfying conclusion to a movie which, I feel, drops the ball quite often and says the one or two things it has to say in a fairly lethargic and slightly dull way.

And I’m really sorry I have to say that but, there you have it.

West Dylan Thordson provides a nice score which includes thematic elements from James Newton Howard’s original Unbreakable score and, presumably, his own score for Split (although I wouldn’t know since, like Glass, it didn’t get a proper CD release, just a download thing, so I haven’t had the opportunity to listen to it away from the movie). It’s an appropriate score, though, and serves the film well in a lot of scenes.

And... that’s all I’ve got to say about Glass. I was disappointed and I suspect that I may not be alone in that. Glass is not a big budget looking superhero film and it certainly feels like it belongs to the same universe as Unbreakable but, at the same time, seems like a dumbed down version of it with maybe a little less icing on the cake than may have been required to make this a fun, entertaining, cinematic experience. Which it pains me to say but... well there you are. I hope this film does well at the box office for Shyamalan because I think that, even though some of the movies are a bit dull, he does provide some beautiful visual moments and I would like to see him mature as a writer. Alas, this doesn’t hold up as one of the great Shyamalan movies I’ve seen and I just hope he can go somewhere more interesting from here.

Lady In The Water

Nymph or Mania?

Lady In The Water
USA 2006 Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Warner Brothers Blue Ray Zone B

Wow. This is a pretty cool movie.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I have an ongoing and strange reaction to the films of M. Night Shyamalan. I try to see them because I always loved Unbreakable but, for the most part, I have found most of his films to be very obvious, unsurprising and disappointing. However, I almost always like the musical scores James Newton Howard composes for Shyamalan... a director who seems to bring out the absolute best in this composer. So I try to see these when I can.

Due to various issues with my life back in 2006, it wasn’t always easy to get to see the latest movies when they hit the cinema and, consequently, Lady In The Water was pretty much the only film by this director which I missed on the big screen. Because it got fairly bad word of mouth and was pretty much a box office failure, I could never really muster up the effort to get around to seeing this one. However, about a year ago I spotted a Blu Ray of the movie going for around £3 and figured I might as well finally get to it. After all, I really like the lead actor Paul Giamatti and, you know, there was that James Newton Howard score to hear within the context of the movie.

I was a little surprised, therefore, when... after a brief narration scene involving cartoon stick figures, giving us a potted background history of the fantasy creatures that are to be found in this tale... I found that the film has a charm and warmth far surpassing my expectations. Right from the outset, when we are introduced to the caretaker of a building, Cleveland Heep, played by Giamatti and the strange water nymph he finds in that building’s swimming pool... ‘Story’, played by Dallas Bryce Howard... I was hooked and wanting to find out just what was going to happen to these people.

Shyamalan’s almost invisible directing style provides us with a window on the many characters who inhabit Heep’s building, gradually introducing a truly amazing cast including Bob Balaban, Freddy Rodriguez, Jeffrey Wright and, of course, Shyamalan himself... who at this point in his career seemed to be writing himself bigger roles with every film he directed. As it happens, he’s pretty amazing in this too so... I can live with that.

Lady In The Water is based on a story M. Night Shyamalan made up to tell his children at bedtime and, as such, this film is a little more whimsical than you might expect from him... dealing, as it does, with water nymphs, their quest to ‘awaken’ a specific person in the world of man, the ferocious grass creatures who seek to stop this and kill said water nymphs and... other story elements which pull together as the film progresses. I don’t want to spoil this one for you so I’ll stop there with the plot details, suffice it to say that the film is about Heep and his quest to identify and slowly gather the necessary people from the tale so he can help Story fulfil her mission and return to her home while, at the same time, trying to protect her from her enemy. And it’s just great, in all honesty.

I’m not quite sure why this got such a bad reaction from people as it’s easily either my favourite or, perhaps, second favourite of this director’s works (although the score is Howard’s least interesting for Shyamalan, it has to be said). Maybe it’s because people are less able to buy into what amounts to almost a fairy tale of a story with adults fulfilling their specific purpose to make the laws of the fantasy world come to life. Or maybe it was just badly publicised by Warner Brothers... who knows? What I do know, though, is that I wish Shyamalan was still making films like this instead of some of the other territory he’s been moving into recently.

The really nice thing about this movie is that Bob Balaban’s character is a film and book critic. Therefore he knows everything about stories and Shyamalan is able to use this element he wrote into the character to slyly stick his tongue into his cheek by simultaneously having this guy deconstruct the elements of the film as they are playing out. It’s almost like he’s poking his tongue out at his critics (but not as a sign of affection in this case, as it might be considered by lovers) and saying to them, “Yeah, this movie is obvious and I know character A is bound to do this and character B will always do this but, actually, that’s not going to stop me from having my cake and eating it by having these characters do these things to move the story forward while I highlight that this is what they are doing anyway.” So it’s kind of cool and I think the last movie before this that I can remember pulling off such a level of self awareness while still using the clichéd elements of its genre rules to play out those very same things was the Stephen Sommers reboot of The Mummy series for Universal back in 1999. Lady In The Water has exactly the same kind of  level of reflexivity in it but it’s even more blatant and spelled out for the audience... and it still manages to get away with it.

Another thing I liked about this one is that there is no expectation of any kind of a twist ending like a great many of this director’s film have. That meant I could feel more relaxed watching it and, although the ending was pretty much a shoe in for the obvious conclusion, I really didn’t mind it and wasn’t in any way disappointed with the film’s denouement either. Which was nice.

All in all, I’d have to heftily recommend Lady In The Water to any of my friends who have a warm heart and like adult fairy tales. It is in no way deserving, in my opinion, of the rating it has on the famous Rotten Tomatoes website and I really don’t know why people are calling it contrived when it’s not something that the writer/director is really trying to hide about this work. So, if you’ve never seen an M. Night Shyamalan film and want to see a good one, check out this one because it’s an unquestionably warm and emotional movie. There aren’t that many of those being made these days, it would seem.

Split

Split In Image

Split
2017 USA
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: Yeah... this pretty much has all the spoilers

Okay, so... if you’re a regular reader here then you probably already know my track record with M. Night Shyamalan is not all that great. He really gets me angry because, in almost every film, his ‘famous twist’ at the end is really obvious and telegraphed right from the start. The Sixth Sense, for example, takes only ten minutes to crack on first viewing. The Village was the worst one for that stuff though... it’s literally the second shot of the movie (which is a reverse shot to the previous if I’m recalling correctly) which is about 30 seconds or so into the film, when the trick ending is made pretty clear in the way the director uses his camera. So I’m not the biggest fan of his storytelling because it’s always so easy to pick up on and his last movie, The Visit (reviewed here) did nothing to change that opinion of his work. About the only time he did surprise me was in Unbreakable, where the nature of Samuel L. Jackson’s character was revealed at the end... so I probably have more respect for that movie than any of his others. I also liked Devil (reviewed here... although that wasn’t actually directed by him, just written from his story idea).

So Split was a movie I kind of put myself through because I quite like James McAvoy but I was pretty sure, on seeing the trailer last year, that it could only have one of two possible endings and so, even before I set foot in the cinema, I was berating Shyamalan for being too obvious. However, the truth be told, he seemed to be banking on me thinking that on this one and... well, I’ll get to that later.

As the trailer suggests, Split is about a man, played by James McAvoy, who is seriously schizophrenic in that he’s holding a multitude of split personalities in his head (23 or possibly 24, to be almost precise). He kidnaps three women, locks them up and is going to do something ‘bad’ to them. And so that’s the general idea and, after the trailer, I realised it could go either way on an ending.

I was pretty certain that one of these two options would be the film’s supposed twist here...

1. Every character in the movie, not just the obvious ones played by James McAvoy, would be another manifestation of his split personality... including the so called victims he had purportedly kidnapped. That seemed like a bit of an easy one even for Shyamalan, though, so my alternative was...

2. Near the end it would be revealed that McAvoy was, in fact, identical twin brothers taking on a large number of personalities each. While the victims had been talking to one or the other manifestations without realising they were talking to differently motivated sets of personalities throughout the course of the movie. This might have made things a little more interesting... was how I was thinking.

As the movie began, from the first shot in fact, I realised Shyamalan had probably gone with the easier option of nobody being real outside of McAvoy’s head. Certainly the way the film was shot and the isolation and lack of interaction in some scenes, plus the constant flashbacks to the abused childhood of the primary kidnap victim played by Anya Taylor-Joy (who was so good in The VVitch which I reviewed here and as Morgan, which I reviewed here) seemed to point right to this kind of denouement.

As it happens, though, M. Night Shyamalan did manage to surprise me but, alas, it was in the least interesting way possible. I had hoped the director may have come up with a third, much more clever option for an end twist but it was not to be. Instead, it was more of a surprise by ommission. Do you remember his movie Signs? I spent the whole of that movie trying to figure out what the explanation was behind the aliens in the movie. What the twist was that turned everything on its head and surprised the audience in an interesting way. However, Signs didn’t have a twist ending, as it turned out. Instead, it basically said that everything in that movie was to be taken as face value and we should just live with the idea that it’s a sci-fi movie. Which didn’t sit well with me, to be honest. Well, in Split, the director heads back to this territory in that there is no twist ending on this movie... everything is there to be taken at face value. Where Shyamalan does get a little clever, then, is by finally adapting his cinematic syntax to mislead the audience to a different conclusion from the correct one, rather than just passively let them ride along second guessing it. The red herrings of the mise-en-scene make the lack of surprise a thing in itself... so, okay, I can at least respect him for this.

I guess my one real grumble out of all this, though, is that just like Signs before it, this makes the film seem somewhat anticlimactic. I wasn’t very happy at the lack of twistedness to the plot here, it has to be said. However, Shyamalan does redeem himself somewhat with a little punchline moment at the end of the movie which, at least, changes your mind about the kind of movie you have been watching up until that point.

So... okay, good things? Well McAvoy is as good as you'd expect as various manifestations of the antagonist's multiple characterisations and Taylor-Joy is also pretty great here, it has to be said. There are some nice shot set ups which, when not trying to make you second guess a different ending, caters to the title with some nicely framed vertical elements which split the shots from time to time. So that’s all good.

The music by West Dylan Thordson is okay too, although I would have preferred to have seen Shyamalan carrying on his immensely creative relationship with composer James Newton Howard, who I think did his best work for the Shyamalan films. Especially since I think that in the last few seconds of the movie they've maybe re-used or tracked in an old theme from an earlier film. I’d certainly buy this score if it was made available in CD format but, alas, it seems once more that I’m not likely to hear it as a stand alone because the only way it seems to be getting a release right now is via electronic download (don’t do it kids... it sucks... make them give the music a proper release.

One of the more stand out moments of the whole experience is that it does have a nice little epilogue scene after the first couple of credits which do put a new slant on the way the movie has been playing out. You do, after all, see one of McAvoy’s personalities eating various people and walking around on walls and ceilings like Spider-Man and once it’s been established that this manifestation is not, surprisingly, in anybody’s head, it then delivers up one little nugget of an end coda which kind of puts the movie into perspective. That being that this whole movie was, in some ways, an elaborate set up for a new supervillain. Yeah, that’s right, it’s an ‘origin story’ for a character called ‘The Horde’. And this is what we take away from the last five or so seconds of the little punchline scene at the end. Set in a diner, some folks are talking about the escaped maniac and one of the diners says it reminds her of that guy that got caught years ago, but couldn’t remember his name. As the diners leave they reveal Bruce Willis in a cameo, reprising his role from Unbreakable and simply saying... “Mr. Glass”. So there you have it... if, and I doubt this but you never know, Shyamalan and Willis ever get around to making their ‘proper’ sequel to Unbreakable, we have a new supervillain for the movie. In the meantime though, this scene firmly identifies Split as an Unbreakable sequel so, for now at least, that’s what we are left with.

Other than that one truly bright moment, however, the film has a lot to admire in it but don’t expect too much from it and don’t expect a twist ending for sure. This is a fairly entertaining ride for a lot of the time (with the usual fun at seeing Shyamalan himself do one of his cameo appearances) but it’s not a great film like... um... well, like Unbreakable was. That being said, it’s not as chronically disappointing as most of his other films either (the jury is still out for The Lady In The Water because I haven’t seen it yet... it’s in the ‘to watch’ pile as I type) and it’s worth a watch for seeing the way McAvoy manages to manifest his various personalities. Not one I would be too bothered with seeing at the cinema but if you’re already a fan of this director then it may be something you enjoy. Not his best but, certainly, not his worst.

The Visit

Visiting Rights

The Visit
2015 USA
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I guess there’s a kind of spoiler 
by ommision in here, in some ways.

Ahhhhh...heck.

So here I am again reviewing another M. Night Shyamalan movie and having a bit of a bad time with it because he’s a director I really admire but he seems to be caught up in this trap of making something similar, in people’s expectations, to old episodes of The Twilight Zone and, while there’s nothing wrong with this... it has to be said that his films set you up so that, when you watch them the first time, you know there’s a twist coming. Unfortunately, they’re always so easy to see way before they happen. The Sixth Sense, for instance, is something that most audiences would twig about twenty minutes into the movie. The Village was even worse in that it takes a few seconds to see the ending, when the second, reverse angle of the opening shot kicks in. So that can be a problem.

And, unfortunately for this director, who really does make great and interesting movies, the other side of that coin he now seems almost doomed to perpetually flip is when he doesn’t bother having a twist in the movie at all... like Signs, for instance. It was a great little film from what I can remember of it but I was distracted the entire length of the movie trying to figure out what the twist was and, when there wasn’t one... I just felt kinda cheated and like I’d been wasting my time, to be honest. Again, not Shyamalan’s fault as it’s the expectations set up in the audience which has done him in for making films which are held up to that kind of scrutiny. For me the most succesful of the ones he’s directed himself was Unbreakable.

Alas, The Visit is another lesson in how to not get fooled by M. Night Shyamalan’s twisty movie making. Although, to be fair, he really does try to pull the wool over the eyes of the audience with the blatant introduction of ideas suggesting lycanthropy, demons and aliens... the very introduction of those elements into the dialogue of the film renders them immediately powerless as options for what the twist ending of this movie is but, by then, it’s far too late and pretty much everyone, I would have thought, would have worked out just what the heck is really going on in this story of an estranged mother’s children going to visit the grandparents they’ve never met, while she goes off and does her own thing for a week.

In truth, there were a dozen ways to have ended this story but Shyamalan decides to take a route less interesting and more humdrum in the way the storyline goes, peppering it with clues enough for you to work it out in such a clumsy way, sometimes, that you wonder if, in fact, they are not more red herrings. By the end of the movie, you’ll realise that this is not a horror film at all and something much safer and, perhaps, a little less special than what you might have hoped for. The dead giveaway for the whole thing is when the camera on the eldest of the two children’s laptop gets damaged... that kind of says it all, I think, in terms of where the writer is going with the ending.

It’s still fairly well constructed in terms of the visual content and the editing, though, and the director makes full use of the fact that it’s a film shot as a documentary (yeah, it’s similar to a found footage movie in that respect) and all done through the camera eyes of mostly the two young children, one of whom is shooting the aforementioned documentary. Because it is shot like this, therefore, Shyamalan can sometimes get away with inserting an establishing shot into the film, since the fictional director of the piece could, also, easily do that. It has to be said, though, that despite the pedestrian subject matter of the story, as it turns out, the director still does manage to deliver edge of the seat tension when it comes to the antics of Pop Pop, played by Peter McRobbie and, especially, the personae of the grandmother, played with carefree creepiness by Deanna Dunagan.

A hide and seek sequence under the house, for example, is especially intense and everything in the film seems set up to make the most of the little moments by bringing scarifying sequences, which turn out to be something completely different, to the table. These allow the small sequences, such as the oven cleaning scene which is the punchline to the trailers put out for this movie, shine in relation to the bigger picture. Unfortunately, the terrific performances of everyone here, including the two main child protagonists played by Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould (who are absolutley brilliant) doesn’t succeed in lifting the film out of the rut it gets stuck in for the last third or suceeed in distracting too much from the direction that the story heads in by the end of the film.

Another big thing missing, and this is again due to the nature of the format the writer/director chose to shoot this movie in, is my main pleasure in seeing a new Shyamalan feature... that of the musical score. His regular collaborator is James Newton Howard and the composer always, whether the film is a good ‘un or not, manages to knock out a truly amazing score for this director’s films. Alas, a couple of “found tracks” are all that are included in this movie but, it’s what would work best for the credibility of the film, to be sure, so one can hardly blame Shyamalan for doing this. I’m sure most people would have gone with that decision given the format the film is trying explore.

And that’s my really short review of this one done. It’s not a terrible film, for sure, and I reckon most people who choose to see this thing at the cinema will not go away feeling like they've wasted their time. There are some nice little visual shock moments and some small comedy moments, too, which work pretty well. A lot of people will have fun with this to some extent, I am sure, and I think this is always a director worth crossing over the road for, just to see what he’s up to next. Not a film I can ever imagine revisiting myself but not a total loss either, as long as you don’t expect any kind of revelation at the end. I’ve read a review on a high profile film site which accused the movie of having a lot of plot holes. Pondering that, I think that’s not an accusation that holds much water. Some things, such as the granny freaking out over the possibility of having to impart certain information, for instance, doesn’t contradict things too much when you realise the bigger picture, as evidenced by a key photograph towards the end of the film, for example. There are some valid cinematic moments in here, I think, even if they might not make sense right away when you reflect on them later. So, yeah, The Visit is an interesting film rather than a mind blowingly good one but, there’s no crime in that and I’m kinda looking forward to seeing what Shyamalan does with his next one, for sure. This one didn’t do too much for me though.

The Happening

What just happened?

The Happening USA/India/France 2008

Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

20th Century Fox Region 2

Warning: There be spoilers happening for this and other Shyamalan films in this article!

I think I’ve talked about M. Night Shyamalan on my blog a few times before. He’s a very talented director and writer who, mostly I feel, just slightly misses the mark when it comes to delivering on the set ups of his movies. Plus he’s really not very good at hiding the obvious conclusions that can lead you to the ending of the film, sometimes within just a couple of shots at the start of the movie (case in point on that was The Village, a movie which telegraphs its ending on shot number two by the way it’s put together).

Shyamalan first came to my attention when I went and saw The Sixth Sense at the cinema... this was an okay and scary film but pretty much within the first 15 minutes you can figure out that the lead character is pretty much dead... what other explanation would there be for the nature of the performances and the pretty blatant sleight of hand within the camera work.

Unbreakable was a more satisfying film because the writer/director kept you concentrating so much on the question as to whether the central character is or isn’t a superhero, that the real twist in the movie kinda leaps at you in the last couple of minutes... that was the only time I’d been impressed with the ending of a Shyamalan movie but it really doesn’t matter in some ways because, even though the camera kind of gives things away in his movies, the end result is usually entertaining whether you got there before the characters in the movie or not.

However, Shyamalan’s big problem was that, by the success of those two movies, his reputation has been kind of cemented as a guy who makes big budget Twilight Zone style stories and because of that, the audience is expecting a clever (oh, okay, maybe not so clever) twist at the end and so, when he tries to make a movie without a twist, everything about the brilliance of some of the way these movies are put together gets thrown out the window by an angry audience who are out for blood. Signs had exactly that effect on me because... well it’s a Shyamalan film so it must have a twist ending, right? So there I am watching an interesting movie about a possible alien invasion and all I’m thinking all the way through is... “no Shyamalan’s gonna be smarter than this, this isn’t aliens, this is something clever and brilliant which I haven’t quite figured out yet but I’m sure the revelation will be absolutely awesome and we’ll all kick ourselves for not seeing it earlier”... and then it turns out to be aliens. Seriously? What the f-? That kinda let me down big time with Shyamalan’s work (and don’t even get me started on The Village properly ‘cause I’ll tear it to pieces).

The Happening is another case in point in the problem with having a reputation of dealing twists and then not delivering on them... which is a shame because this movie has such an intriguing set up that it’s impossible not to want to find out what’s going on in it. And, like Signs, that’s the major downfall of this movie.

The films starts brilliantly with loads of people in a large park and other areas of a suburban city freezing for a few seconds and all but a few of them succumbing to “something” which makes them all kill themselves in the most hideous (sometimes) but convenient ways. There’s a brilliant sequence where dozens of builders walk off scaffolding to their collective demise. A national emergency is called and our hero Marky Mark Wahlberg and his wife and his friend and his friend's gooey, cutesy daughter go on a road trip to try to escape the epidemic of suicides that is happening all over the country.

Early on Shyamalan cleverly puts what I thought was a red herring in your mind... Marky Mark is a teacher and “nature’s defence mechanisms” are discussed. Then, later on in the story he further builds on this ridiculous premise by having a guy who owns a nursery suggest that the plants on the planet have had enough and are spreading a pollen which causes mankind to somehow kill itself (yeah, right). Unfortunately, for anyone watching this film, it turns out that in the end of the story what has been happening is that “the plants on the planet have had enough and are spreading a pollen which causes mankind to somehow kill itself”... wow! Deja vu!

Seriously, this isn’t really good enough. Okay, so the guy may have written himself into a corner with a brilliant set up which he then couldn’t explain... or it might have been his intention all along... but to keep dumbing down to the lowest common denominator and giving the audience a blatant commentary all the way through about what’s causing the problems is a terrible idea. It would have been better if those sequences had just been cut and the plant thing was a big reveal at the end... except he couldn’t have done that because by about three quarters of the way through the movie, the dwindling supply of survivors are using that explanation to stay away from trouble... so maybe an approach would have been to categorically state that this was the explanation in some way so that audiences didn’t get their hopes up for a better ending... that way the response may have been a lot more positive I would expect.

The trouble with this approach is, like all of Shyamalan’s films, the movie itself is absolutely brilliantly made and riveting to watch... right up to the end where it all caves in on itself. This guy does not end well is my opinion. But, if you’re the kind of person who can see past the weakness of one section of a movie and appreciate the rest for what it is, then you’ll see that Shyamalan’s actually a subtle blend of the celluloid sensibilities of Hitchcock and Spielberg and that he is an artist worth keeping an eye on.

As always in his films, his greatest collaborator here is composer James Newton Howard who, for some reason, always manages to deliver an absolutely top notch, knock it out of the park masterpiece of a score for Shyamalan (where he often doesn’t do that for other directors) and this one is no exception. There is a scene in this movie where our “survivors” go past a car with a parking alert sound on and I believe that same sound is the basis for this score as it is echoed, deliberately or not, in the bricks and mortar of the notes that comprise the main title. The standalone CDs of these things are always worth picking up because Howard’s true musical genius comes to the foreground on these projects.

And that’s really all I can say about The Happening. It’s very simple... if you’re the kind of person who cares about the ending of the movie and this overshadows everything else you’ve seen getting there, then The Happening is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, the ending is not going to wreck it for you and you can happily watch an interesting study in the art of cinematic suspense, then The Happening is definitely worth a look as Shyamalan usually handles the semiotics of shot flow and edit like a real auteur. And listen out for that beautiful score which creeps up on you like a ghost... it's all good stuff.