Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Visitor’ on Amazon Prime Video, Another Small Budget Blumhouse Production Aiming For Big Scares

The Visitor (now on Amazon Prime Video) is another in a long line of Blumhouse horror-thriller cheapies, and I don’t say that to throw shade – some of those cheapies ended up being quite good, Nocturne, The Vigil and most recently M3gan among them. This one stars Game of Thrones and Iron Fist star Finn Jones and Mortal Kombat veteran Jessica McNamee as a couple who move into an old house in a small town and find themselves embroiled in a disconcerting and inscrutable supernatural-mystery movie plot. Don’t you HATE IT when that happens? Yeah, me too.

THE VISITOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: They’re friendly. Too friendly. Saucer-eyed, uber-toothy, demento-faced friendly. Is it the fabled hospitality of the American South, or something else? Not sure. Robert (Finn Jones) maybe might sort of notice it, but we definitely do. He’s a British expat, married to Maia (Jessica McNamee). They’ve moved from London to her family home in smalltown rural wherever (Louisiana maybe, judging by the deep drawls) after her father passes away. The house is old and dusty, all the furniture covered with sheets – but you know, a little paint and elbow grease, maybe an exorcism or two, and it’ll be just like home. First thing they do when they arrive? Robert sneaks one of his prescription pills but lies to Maia that he threw them away. Maia beelines it to a secret hidey-hole beneath the tile, where she finds an old baby doll with a burlap sack on its head. Which is more disconcerting? Dunno. Consult a marriage counselor. One could likely help with the exposition too, exposition about the miscarriage they endured not too long ago.

Maia takes Robert to the local watering hole, where the local bartender and the local pastor make him drink too much local moonshine while Maia feeds him the local delicacy, chitlins. He gets blasted and has a dream that night, of an old woman with putrid teeth and blotched-out eyes up in the attic room, weeping at first, then screeching. In reality, although there’s some blurring of that with surreality, he finds a painting in that room, specifically a portrait, of a man that looks shockingly like – well, like Robert. A brass plate at the bottom of the frame reads, THE VISITOR ACCEPTS. Curious. Boy howdy, we got ourselves a bona fide mystery here!

Does the plot thick? Of course. And how: Robert heads into town and gets treated like some sort of prodigal son. The woman at the grocer eyes him with odd admiration and sends him to an antique shop where he spots another painting of Confederate soldiers, one of which is another Robert doppelganger. The antique shopkeep issues words of warning and, a scene or two later, she’s murdered by a swarm of locusts. Meanwhile, Robert keeps having weird dreams and awkward encounters with the townsfolk and Maia shows him a positive pregnancy test and a weirdo pulls up in their driveway to speak in riddles and suddenly the house is infested with frogs and is this movie going to gather all its red herrings in one place or what? Is Robert about to be Midsommared or something? WE CAST YE OUT DEMON SPOILERS!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Anyone else getting that Rosemary’s Baby meets Into the Dark vibe?

Performance Worth Watching: This is a tough row to hoe. Let’s just say that McNamee and Jones seem capable of doing more than this screenplay gives them.

Memorable Dialogue: Our antique-shop lady’s dire words for our befuddled protagonist: “You think you want answers. You’re wrong. The truth is your worst enemy.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Visitor is competently photographed, directed and acted, and director Justin P. Lange stirs up a bit of atmosphere and maintains consistent tone and pacing. But the modest superlatives pretty much end there. The screenplay seems to have cut-and-pasted chunks from about a dozen other movies – from Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen to Get Out and OG Evil Twigs flick The Wicker Man – and such familiarity breeds discontent, but moreso boredom. Things clearly Aren’t Right for our protagonist, who falls into a predictable cycle of disconcerting interactions with townsfolk, jump scares, It’s Only A Dream sequences and marital discontent, while the plot teases out small revelations, stacking them up to a finale that’s too drab and anticlimactic to be chilling or memorable.

Lange struggles to generate tension or rouse emotional investment in the characters, and subtextually, this thing is the equivalent of grabbing the package of Oreos and realizing some j-hole put it back in the pantry empty. The film tries to draw on fish-out-of-water discomfort and bits of creepy Biblical fodder – plagues of locusts, weird old paintings, a crucifix that insists on being inverted, etc. – that don’t add up to much beyond vague provocations. The Visitor isn’t terrible; it’s just too mediocre for its own good.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Blumhouse dishes up a dud here.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.