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The Visit | 2015 | PG-13 | - 4.6.5

A divorced mom (Kathryn Hahn) sends her teen son (Ed Oxenbould) and teen daughter (Olivia De Jonge) to spend a week with their estranged grandparents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) at their Pennsylvania farm. While visiting, the kids have the fright of their lives as they witness the strange activities of their grandparents. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. [1:34]

SEX/NUDITY 4 - A teen girl records a teen boy as he poses in front of his mirror, showing his chest, while he is saying he is candy for the ladies. An elderly woman wearing a long skirt turns and walks away and we see a buttock up to the waist through a long tear in the material. A teen boy hears gurgling and banging, opens his bedroom door and we see an elderly woman standing across the hall in full back nudity, scratching at a doorframe, her buttocks jiggling. An elderly woman wears a long sleeveless nightgown that is opaque. In three laptop-screen full views during Internet chats, a woman leans forward toward the camera and she is wearing a V-necked top that reveals significant cleavage and in one of the shots we see the edges of her bra. In a laptop communication, a woman dances with a dance class on a cruise ship and they are all wearing bikinis or bikini tops and shorts (we see cleavage along with the bottoms of two pairs of buttocks).
 A woman tells her 15-year-old daughter that she fell in love with one of her high school teachers (the girl's dad) and eloped with him at age 19, had two children with him, and then he fell in love with a woman he met at Starbucks and left her and their kids. A teen boy tells his teen sister that she does not have any boobs yet. A boy teases his teen sister about her liking the pizza delivery boy and she becomes tearful. In a laptop chat, a woman is on a cruise ship and says that there will be a Hairy Chest Contest, but we do not see it.
 A man stands in the background behind a kitchen counter and we hear him remove and drop his shoes as his right hand moved as if pulling down his pants (no flesh is visible); the man places a folded adult diaper on top of the counter (implication is that it is his).

VIOLENCE/GORE 6 - An elderly man walks into a basement, sneaks up on a teen girl and grabs her; he says that a woman and children are in suitcases at the bottom of a pond, where the teen girl is going to join them; he forces her into a bedroom and locks her in with an elderly woman, who covers herself in a sheet like a ghost, crawls under the bed, snorts and reaches out several times, then sneaks up to the girl and grabs her, smashes the girl onto a mirror (it cracks loudly in several places) and then throws her onto a bed, strangling her as the girl screams for several seconds; the girl stabs the woman with a piece of broken glass and escapes by breaking the handle off the door (we see some blood on the teen girl's face, a pillow, and the older woman's face). A teen boy lies on a kitchen floor with his face reddened by bruises and an elderly man pulls him up by the hair, stands him by the sink and smashes a dirty adult diaper in his face; a teen girl enters and jumps on the man's back, the man grabs her and throws her to the floor as she screams and the boy jumps on the man while screaming unintelligible words several times and smashes the man into a cabinet in the background; the man's head lands on the floor behind the kitchen counter, the boy shouts in anger, and then he opens and slams the refrigerator door on the man's head six times (we cannot see it).
 A teen girl walks into a farmhouse basement and sees three large gas cans that look like they are sitting in pools of blood; she finds a bloody hammer, two mental institution uniforms and the bludgeoned bodies of an elderly man and an elderly woman (we see the dead faces, gray with bruises and dried blood on their cheeks and foreheads). A teen boy and a teen girl open a door in an old farm house and see a woman hanging dead from a tree in the background of the scene and they slam the door shut.
 A teen boy and a teen girl set up a camera to film the first floor of a farmhouse at night; they see an elderly woman slam a closet door over a dozen times before she finds the camera and screams into it in close-up, takes up a large knife and attempts to break down the door of a bedroom, but is unsuccessful (she kicks the door twice before giving up and the scene ends). A teen boy and his teen sister chase each other through the crawl space under a large house and an elderly woman on all fours, her long gray hair covering her head, crawls after each youth fast, scaring them until they hyperventilate and the girl shouts in fear as the woman calls out, "I'm gonna getcha!"; the girl scrambles out and falls onto her face as the elderly woman crawls out, stands, laughs and announces lunch.
 A elderly woman asks a teen girl to crawl completely inside an oven to clean it in a couple of scenes and one time the woman slams the metal door shut with the girl inside, wipes it clean for several seconds, then opens it and lets the startled girl out. A teen girl finds an elderly man with a rifle and he says twice that he is only cleaning it. A teen girl jumps out of a closet and startles her younger brother.
 A woman arrives at a farmhouse to visit with an elderly couple and does not leave again; she argues with an elderly couple outside and from inside the house by a window and we can hear muffled voices. On a town sidewalk with a teen boy and a teen girl, an elderly man runs across the street, knocks down a man and shouts, "Stop following me!" An elderly woman hits herself on the forehead with an open hand. A teen girl asks an elderly woman why her mother and she did not speak for 15 years and the woman begins to look angry, then screams and shudders, flinging her hands around for several seconds.
 An elderly man takes a used adult diaper (please see the Sex/Nudity category for more details), unfolds it so the camera views the feces inside, and says, "You have a problem with germs, don't you?" and with the back of the boy's head to the camera, he rubs the diaper on the boy's face and the camera cuts away (we don't see the feces on the face). A teen girl walks downstairs one night and finds an elderly woman projectile vomiting at the foot of a long staircase (we see brown and yellow goo hitting the floor twice as the old woman moans) and an elderly man later says it was a "24-hour stomach thing" and old people sometimes get sick. A teen boy says that he wonders if dead bodies are in a farm shed and when he walks inside it, he finds a table covered with white plastic bags and buzzing flies; he picks up one bag and it unfolds to show feces on an adult diaper causing him to drop it, gasp, cough and run out of the shed.
 A teen boy and a teen girl see an elderly woman wearing a long nightgown running back and forth through a hallway a few times, after which she lowers herself to all fours and crawls around like a bug. An elderly woman walks through a hallway as if in a trance. An elderly woman stands in a catatonic trance with one arm raised for several seconds, until her husband leads her out of the room.
 A teen girl finds an elderly woman sitting in a rocker facing a wall, rocking and laughing; she tells the girl that she has a deep darkie and ties her headscarf tightly around her eyes, but the girl pulls off the scarf and the woman says, "You have to laugh to keep the deep darkies in a cave." An elderly woman tells a teen girl that a pond is home to alien creatures who put humans into a deep sleep and place them on the bottom of the pond for storage until time to take them to their home planet. Teen siblings show their mother her parents via a laptop camera and the mother looks horrified; she tells the kids those people are not her parents, calls the police, gets a voice message and tells her children that she is going to pick them up as fast as she can. A man tells a teen girl that he was fired from a factory because he saw a white thing running around the floor at night and a few nights later, he tells her it is out in a field at home, but we never see it. We hear that when a father left his 8-year-old son and 10-year old daughter, the boy became germaphobic and the girl refused to look at herself in a mirror ever again. An elderly man and an elderly woman tell two children not to go into the basement of their farmhouse, because the mold there will sicken them; the children are also not to leave their shared bedroom after 9:30 pm for any reason. A man says that a woman is "sun downing," causing her to imagine that her eaten food is trying to get out of her body. A teen girl cries because their father left them. A teen girl looks up Sundown Syndrome and tells her brother that an elderly man and an elderly woman are suffering from a chemical reaction to the sun going down, becoming paranoid and angry. An elderly woman tells a teen boy that an elderly man wears adult diapers and is ashamed to do so, so he collects the soiled diapers in the shed and burns them later in a field. A teen girl asks her mother why her grandparents are estranged from them and the mother replies that at age 19 she struck her mother, her father struck her, they all stood in shock for several seconds and the daughter left; the daughter refused to respond to her parents' attempts to contact her to reconcile and now they are dead. A mother and her teen daughter hug each other and cry.
 A teen boy wipes doorknobs with a handkerchief in several scenes and he has a panic attack, complaining that he is out of tissues and touched a toilet handle, making him feel the germs all over his hands (we cannot see anything on his hands).
 A boy films himself with his mouth open wide, his tongue out and slobbering, saliva spewing.

LANGUAGE 5 - At least 1 F-word, 1 obscene hand gesture, 2 scatological terms, 2 anatomical terms, 4 mild obscenities, name-calling (Ho, old people, old coot, confused old fools, insane, crazy, fat, weird, blind, stupid, douche, brats), exclamations (wow, I don't give a ..., what the ..., shut up), female pop star names are used by a boy as cursing (Shakira, Carrie Underwood, Laura McLaughlin, Shania Twain), 1 religious profanity (GD), 2 religious exclamations (God, For Heaven's Sake).

SUBSTANCE USE - An elderly woman's nightstand contains several prescription bottles and a lotion tube with unreadable labels, we hear that a woman took medications and underwent therapy for four years, we hear that a woman in her thirties was in drug rehab, an elderly couple mention a Magic Elixir (we never see it), and a young teen boy mimics smoking a marijuana cigarette in front of a high school. A woman smokes a tobacco cigarette outside her house, and an elderly woman smokes at her dining room table.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Mental illness, physical confrontation, murder, families, relationships, love, marriage, abandonment, fidelity, forgiveness, reconciliation, germ phobia.

MESSAGE - Always make room for forgiveness and reconciliation.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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