The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable director M. Night Shyamalan hasn’t had a bona fide box-office hit in nearly a decade, but there was a time when his name was synonymous with tense, psychological thrillers that kept audiences guessing (and on the edges of their seats) right up until the credits rolled. After a string of big-budget bombs, Shyamalan appears to be returning to his roots with his latest film, The Visit, about a pair of kids who discover all is not as it seems with their elderly grandparents.
The first trailer for The Visit premiered this week, and it serves up some pretty good scares — as well as some hope that Shyamalan may have rediscovered the niche he carved out so well for himself in the early 2000s.
The Visit casts Ed Oxenbould (Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day) and Olivia DeJonge (The Sisterhood of Night) as a pair of siblings whose week-long visit with their grandparents — played by Deanna Dunagan (Have a Little Faith) and Peter McRobbie (Lincoln) — takes a sinister turn when they begin discovering the creepy and disturbing habits of grandma and grandpa late at night (and occasionally during the day, too). The pair’s absent and oblivious mother is played by Kathryn Hahn (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty).
The first poster for the film also debuted this week, and it offers up a list of “Grandma’s Rules” listed below:
Nothing cryptic about that last one, eh?
The Visit is Shyamalan’s first thriller since 2008’s The Happening, a box-office flop that was followed by two more big-budget disappointments in The Last Airbender and After Earth. However, prior to his string of underperforming projects, Shyamalan was a veritable hit machine in Hollywood, earning both critical praise and commercial success with films like the Oscar-nominated thriller The Sixth Sense, Signs, and The Village.
The Visit hits theaters September 11.
