“M. Night does a good job with these. His Hellevator movie (whatever that was called) was pretty good. If he’s got like a limited budget and locations and no big special effects, I feel like that’s his jam.
But there’s still something weird about his writing.
As exemplified by a kid getting a shitty diaper in the face.
This was awesome, by the way, 10/10, favorite part.
Buuuuut in the Visit, we’ve got these two kids, and one is a germaphobe. And so he gets the diaper in the face, naturally.
It almost felt like M. Night was setting up that this would be traumatizing for him, but that seems unnecessary to me, I think anyone would be horrified to get a filled diaper in the face.
There is some setup where the kid says he freezes when bad shit is happening or something, he tells a story about freezing when he was under pressure on the football field. This is set in so that when the kid freezes, it gives the movie an excuse for an elderly man to overpower a kid who’s maybe 13? 14?
This all makes a weird sort of sense, as much sense as you can hope to bring to diaper in the face. And at the same time, it’s maybe a little overwritten or overexplained. You could just have the kid freeze under extreme stuff, and getting a diaper in the face would qualify. Really no need to tell me he’s a germaphobe.
It’s just my way of explaining the weirdness of his writing. The Diaper in the Face Theory, as it were. Which was originally named after me more specifically, but I decided that when the theory describes a shitty diaper in the face, eh, I can let the ego slide on that one.”