Producers: Paige Pemberton and Paul B. Uddo Director: Justin P. Lange Screenplay: Adam Mason and Simon Boyes Cast: Finn Jones, Jessica McNamee, Thomas Francis Murphy, Dane Rhodes, Donna Biscoe, Shanna Lynn Forrestall, Susan McPhail, Sue Rock and Elizabeth Newcomer Distributor: Epix
Grade: C-
Poaching from “Rosemary’s Baby” and “The Omen” as well as every movie made about sinister small towns, isolated farmhouses, and doppelgangers, Adam Mason and Simon Boyes’s script for “The Visitor” offers a jumble of tired horror tropes that never manages to make sense, let alone generate chills.
The film opens with a scene that’s become all too familiar in recent thrillers: a young couple is driving to a new rural home, in this case near a town called Briar Glen, presumably in Louisiana, where the picture was shot. They’re Robert (Finn Jones) and Maia (Jessica McNamee), who are moving into the home of her recently deceased father. They had been living in London, where they’d met cute in a bar—he the local lad, she the American tourist—gotten married, and then endured a domestic tragedy when Maia suffered a miscarriage.
The townsfolk, like barmaid Judy (Shanna Lynn Forrestall), minister Otis Ellis (Dane Rhodes) and general store clerk Kathy (Susan McPhail), welcome them effusively, but Robert is unnerved when he finds an old painting of a man who resembles himself in the attic, and even more so when he stumbles upon other paintings and photographs from various times showing men who seem to have been his doubles. Before long he’s warned by people like art dealer Madame Devereaux (Donna Biscoe) and frantic conspiracy researcher Maxwell Braun (Thomas Francis Murphy) that evil is afoot and he’s in danger, but Maia dismisses her husband’s increasing anxiety. By this time she’s pregnant again.
As is usual in such stories, Robert begins having terrible nightmares which seem all too real, especially a vision of an old, skeletal woman. And the attentions of the locals, especially overzealous Reverend Ellis, become decidedly oppressive. The fates of Devereaux and Braun only add to Robert’s certainty that something awful is happening.
Unfortunately, that something turns out to be the movie, which offers an elaborate explanation that in the end proves pretty confounding. It all somehow has to do with Satan establishing a “new Eden” on earth, in which Robert and his newborn son will play a central role, incest, and a cult of devil worshippers who perform rituals while gyrating in ridiculous outfits and dance happily in the streets in slow motion with the apparent success of their plans. But why this plan has apparently extended over centuries and has proceeded in such a circuitous fashion is never satisfactorily disclosed, and the final scene is an enigmatic disappointment.
On the plus side, Jones brings total commitment to his role, and Rhodes chews the scenery amusingly as the overwrought preacher; Murphy and Biscoe go the route of excess too, though to lesser effect. (In their defense, they have less screen time to munch.) On the other hand McNamee is just okay, and the rest of the supporting cast are just caricatures of Southern lack of charm. And the Blumhouse production is pretty solid technically (production design by Owl Martin Dwyer, cinematography by Federico Verardi), and editor Andrew Wesman does what he can with the disconnected bits of story. Gavin Brivik adds a score heavy on foreboding.
“The Visitor” doesn’t merit a visit.