Macbeth and The Visit
1April 24, 2016 by Laird
Recent viewing at the Barron residence: Justin Kurzel’s 2015 adaptation of Macbeth and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Visit.
Macbeth isn’t a particularly ambitious re-imagining of the material, but Arkapaw’s cinematography is gorgeous while Fassbender (Macbeth), Cotillard (Lady Macbeth), and Harris (Macduff) kick all kinds of ass.
Meanwhile, with The Visit, director Shyamalan returns to his early form with a solid and occasionally brilliant bit of paranoia-cinema about teenage siblings who spend the week on an isolated farm with their estranged grandparents. The only real fault is M. Night’s almost fanatical observance of the O Henry or Hitchcock twist, and I suspect most viewers will see the pucn winding up long before it’s delivered. Kudos to Deanna Dunagan who chews the scenery as the increasingly disturbed Nana.
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The Visit played with familiar tropes of familial threat, menace and dread. The grandmother’s menacing madness, which revealed itself only gradually, was especially chilling. I loved this gem of a horror film about intimate strangers.