a review of 探访惊魂

HOOPTOBER NINE! NIGHT SEVEN! I was pleasantly surprised by this one, it's formally/textually playful and self-aware in a way that I don't normally associate with Shyamalan, and he manages to make the found-footage conceit work in a way that feels organic to the story without falling into all of the usual tropes. I do wish that Shyamalan had a better handle on how to write mentally-ill or disabled characters empathetically without immediately monsterizing them, if only because it would have given the ending here a little more punch. As it is, this movie has the kids more or less immediately understand that there's something very wrong with Nana and Pop-Pop, then pulls that idea back in favor of pushing a semi-nuanced understanding of aging and mental deterioration, only to flip right back to "yup, they're psychos" at the end. That said, it may be unfair to pin all the blame on Shyamalan, since he's operating inside a genre that has a long history of exactly doing this sort of thing, but it still held me back from enjoying this one more than I did.