Rating (3 out of 5)

This is a movie from 2015 that I never had a chance to see. So it was available on one of the movie channels, and I had some time to kill, why not watch it.

I will be honest I am wary of M. Night Shymalan movies. I feel like I am always waiting for the big reveal. His movies have the same structure, over and over, and it gets a little boring for us his audience.

So the movie sets out well, with the young daughter Becca, played by Olivia DeJonge, filming her mother for a documentary she is making about their family. The mom describes a little about why she and her parents haven’t talked in years. The two kids Becca and her brother Tyler, played by Ed Oxenbould, head by bus to see their grandparents.

Their grandparents greet them at the bus stop, and they take pictures etc. They go back to the house, which seems like a normal house. They bake cookies and talk.

Slowly we are introduced to problems around the house. The kids aren’t supposed to leave their room after 9:30, as the grandmother suffers from Sundowners and run’s amok throughout the house.

Here is the list of key events

• Grandma chases kids down in the crawl space; not in a playful way be scary way
• Grandma is laughing out loud, and Becca ask what TV show she is watching, and finds her grandmother in her rocking chair staring at the wall.
• Grandpa is discovered in the shed holding shotgun to his mouth
• Grandpa pushes and shoves a man in town for no reason at all
• Grandma just acts weird in most of the times

Then of course, the kids plan to escape. Before they run, they Skype their mom, and then comes the big reveal. SPOILER: Those aren’t your grandparents.

Why does the reveal have to be so stupid. From there we can predict how it goes. Kids overcome the weaknesses they cited earlier in the movie making the documentary, and the real grandparents were killed by these people from the institute they used to provide counseling.

The kids were just a little pretentious for me, with the movie making and the rapping. The film was a lot more predictable than I had hoped. In the trailer you see all the really good scenes.

It was a decent basic thriller, that offered little in terms of surprises.