Review Roundup: Deanna Dunagan Goes from Stage to Scare in THE VISIT

M. Night Shyamalan's horror film THE VISIT opens today, Sept. 11, 2015. The film stars award-winning stage actress Deanna Dunagan as well as Olivia DeJonge, Ed Oxenbould, Peter McRobbie, Kathryn Hahn, and Celia Keenan-Bolger.

Becca (Olivia DeJonge) and younger brother Tyler (Ed Oxenbould) say goodbye to their mother as they board a train and head deep into Pennsylvania farm country to meet their maternal grandparents for the first time. Welcomed by Nana (Deanna Dunagan) and Pop Pop (Peter McRobbie), all seems well until the siblings start to notice increasingly strange behavior from the seemingly charming couple. Once the children discover a shocking secret, they begin to wonder if they'll ever make it home.

The film was produced by Blumhouse Productions and distributed by Universal Studios.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

Manohla Dargis, The New York Times: The director M. Night Shyamalan has a fine eye and a nice, natural way with actors, and he has a talent for gently rap-rap-rapping on your nerves. At his best, he skillfully taps the kinds of primitive fears that fuel scary campfire stories and horror flicks; at his worst, he tries too hard to be an auteur instead of just good, letting his overwrought stories and self-consciousness get in the way of his technique. After straining at originality for too long, he has gone back to basics in "The Visit," with a stripped-down story and scale, a largely unknown (excellent) cast and one of those classically tinged tales of child peril that have reliably spooked audiences for generations.

Peter Travers, Rolling Stone: Well, it's not in the same league as The Sixth Sense, but director M. Night Shyamalan ends a long dry spell with The Visit. It's a blend of mirth and malice that combines Grimm fairy tales with the found-footage gimmick of Paranormal Activity. A mom (Kathryn Hahn) sends her two kids (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould), both experts with digital cameras, to visit her estranged parents. It's all smiles until Grandma (Deanna Dunagan, wowza) gets naked and Grandpa (Peter McRobbie) does strange things with his adult diapers. No spoilers, except to say that cheap thrills can still be a blast. Not enough to make up for Shyamalan's awful After Earth, but it's a start.

Geoff Berkshire, Variety: After delivering back-to-back creative and commercial duds in the sci-fi action genre, M. Night Shyamalan retreats to familiar thriller territory with "The Visit." As far as happy homecomings go, it beats the one awaiting his characters, though not by much. The story of two teens spending a week with the creepy grandparents they've never met unfolds in a mockumentary style that's new for the filmmaker and old hat for horror auds. Heavier on comic relief (most of it intentional) than genuine scares, this low-budget oddity could score decent opening weekend B.O. and ultimately find a cult following thanks to its freakier twists and turns, but hardly represents a return to form for its one-time Oscar-nominated auteur.

Jane Horwitz, The Washington Post: Both creepy and funny, this horror thriller has what it takes to entertain and spook teen audiences. It is too unsettling for most preteens, although the violence and language stay out of R territory. Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, "The Visit" has some of the same qualities that made his early films ("The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," "Signs") such hits: psychologically credible characters, offbeat humor and cool plot twists.

Mike McCahill, The Guardian: An hour of numbingly tedious potter precedes the inevitable twist-reveal, which plunges us into a risible final act combining the twin pleasures of Yahtzee and adult incontinence. Dull, derivative and flatly unscary. I'm afraid I see only a dead career.

Sara Stewart, New York Post: Conveniently, Becca is an aspiring filmmaker. Her handheld footage (thankfully, not all of the shaky-cam variety) is one of the director's many nods to genre classics from "The Blair Witch Project" to "The Exorcist" to "Paranormal Activity." Less generously, one could accuse Shyamalan of being shamelessly derivative - but hey, he's cribbing from reliably spooky tactics (as opposed to hitting us with overblown CGI, as he's been known to do). As screenwriter, he's also crafted a pretty decent fairy tale, right up to having Nana invite her granddaughter to get ALL the way in the oven to clean it. Dunagan and McRobbie have a blast in their respective roles, alternating between everyday grandparent ODDITIES and behavior that wouldn't be out of place at the Overlook Hotel. And overall, the young duo makes an affable pair of narrators.

Peter Hall, New York Daily News: This "Visit" is unlikely to leave a "Sixth Sense"-like dent on pop culture, and it may have a few too many easy scares. But the movie remains PROOF that Shyamalan can still keep you up at night.

Clark Collis, Entertainment Weekly: Certainly, this is the first Shyamalan movie in a long time that viewers may be tempted to re-visit just to see how he pulls off his magic trick.

Sheri Linden, Hollywood Reporter: A family get-together starts out strange and quickly enters nightmare territory in The Visit, a horror-thriller that turns soiled adult diapers into a motif. Told from a camera-equipped kids'-eye view, M. Night Shyamalan's latest is well cast and strong on setting. But the dull thudding that resounds isn't part of its effective aural design; it's the ungainly landing of nearly every shock and joke. Notwithstanding the evidence of Shyamalan's features since the pitch-perfect Sixth Sense, hope endures among fans that lightning will strike twice. In the wake of bloated recent outings After Earth and The Last Airbender, that hope takes on a particular fervency with this modestly scaled return to straight-up genre fare. That anticipation will drive theatrical business for the feature, as will the lure of sheer horror fun, at least until word-of-mouth stems the box-office tide.

Bryan Bishop, The Verge: More than anything else, it feels like Shyamalan Unleashed, operating without the weight of expectations for the first time in years. The filmmaker had actually focused on smaller, character-driven films before The Sixth Sense changed his career trajectory, but ever since that early success, his movies seemed to chase the same formula, twist endings and all. The Visit doesn't seem concerned with living up to those expectations - there's no mistaking this for a Spielbergian tale - and it's a fresher story for it.

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