The Real Villain In The Visit Isn't Who You Think

It's usually pretty easy to figure out who the villain is in a horror movie. Typically, it's the scary-looking entity that kills a bunch of people. Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers are just some of the all-time great villains in the genre, but sometimes, you have to look deeper than who's wearing a spooky mask. 

The same would appear to be the case for 2015's "The Visit," directed by M. Night Shyamalan. The film follows two kids who visit their grandparents for the week, but their elders begin to act rather strange. In true Shyamalan fashion, the children soon learn that the people they thought were their relatives are actually two killers, and they have to fight for their lives to make it out of the house alive.

On the surface, it would seem like the phony grandparents are, indeed, the real villains. They certainly are; no one doubts that. But there's someone else in the mix who's just as much to blame for putting the kids in such a precarious situation.

The children's mother, Loretta Jamison (Kathryn Hahn), seems perfectly lovely, but some of her behavior could be classified as negligent. She leaves her children at her parents' house while she goes on a cruise with her boyfriend, but she doesn't drop them off personally. It might be one thing if they were all really close, but as we learn, Loretta hasn't spoken to her parents in 15 years. With her eldest child, Becca (Olivia DeJonge), being 15, too, she's never met her grandparents and, therefore, doesn't know what they look like. 

That revelation only comes at the film's finale, but if Loretta had taken the time to travel with her offspring, she would've immediately noticed those two aren't her parents. She could've saved her kids from a lot of psychological turmoil if she had gone on the train with the kids. She wouldn't have recognized the two phony grandparents at the train station, and all this could've been avoided. Better yet, she could've driven them to the house in the first place, where she could've promptly called the police because it's now a home invasion. 

It's not like the kids see their elders every summer. It's been 15 years since she saw them; you would think she would want to bury the hatchet for real and see them face-to-face. In the end, she's not the first movie mom to put her kids in danger, and she likely won't be the last.