Doppelgänger Horror in ‘The Visitor’ [Review]
Chad Collins
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The Visitor feels wildly out of place in 2022. Both a blessing and a curse, Justin P. Lange’s (The Seventh Day) outing feels antiquated in ways that work and contemporary in ways that consistently bog its doppelgänger horrors down. Two decades ago, The Visitor might have been a primetime delight, a just barely R-rated cult horror show that was passably frightening enough to work. As part of a deal between Blumhouse TV and Epix—with The Visitor poised to premiere on Epix this December after a VOD stint—The Visitor feels more akin to a small town that viewers have visited one too many times before. Ignore the cute antique store, just drive on through.
Robert (Finn Jones, Game of Thrones) moves with wife Maia (Jessica McNamee, Mortal Kombat) to her hometown of Briar Glen after the death of her father. The opening moments are abounding with dusty horror cliché. Robert is inexplicably plagued by nightmares. The town denizens seem culled from a Thomas Tryon novel, aggressively saccharine and conspicuously up to no good. There are creepy dolls in the floorboards of Maia’s father’s house. The gotcha scares are of the falling book or “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you” variety.
British Robert’s fish out of water discomfort comes to a fever pitch when he discovers a series of paintings whose subject bears an uncanny resemblance to him. It’s a town absolutely awash in Finn Jones portraits. Yet, no one aside from Robert seems the least bit freaked out. Even Robert, for his part, remains remarkably calm at first. This, despite portraits titled “The Visitor Accepts” or “The Visitor Watches it Burn.” Norman Rockwell portraits these are not.
Unstructured from the start, the threat remains frustratingly opaque. The Visitor packs a kitchen sink of scary Americana, ghost grannies, and nightmarish visions besieging Robert one after the other. Untethered from anything else, Robert hardly manages to remark to anyone, even wife Maia, that what he’s experiencing is far beyond the realm of an anxiety medication oopsie, one of several regressive horror threads The Visitor is keen on dredging up. Even the interpersonal tension between them feels requisite rather than organic, despite the best efforts of both Jones and McNamee. Dialogue starts normally enough before an unseen script writer accelerates the conflict. Conversations haphazardly flop between standard greetings and miscarriage bombshells.
Small town weirdness isn’t enough to solidify the tension into something meaningful, even if several of the jolts are admittedly effective. Ephemeral and cheap, sure, but effective all the same. Gavin Brivik’s score is strong, though it often does the heavy lifting where everything else fails. Lighting, composition, and blocking are afterthoughts as the music swells for mundane trips to the general store or several scenes of Robert staring at his other self.
Where The Visitor earns some credit is its subtle subversion of horror tropes. This time, it’s Maia who gaslights her husband into thinking nothing is out of the ordinary. Additionally, some icky third-act developments at least add some backward zest to an otherwise forgettable tale of doubles run amok. It feels like a 90s horror movie through and through, all the way down to its unconvincing digital effects, with swarms of locusts looking to have been put together at the last possible moment. There are cults, regressive ideals, homesteads, and fertility. The Pagan undertones are strong, but they’re remarkably familiar. It’s a harvest that’s been had hundreds of times before.
The Visitor does very little to distinguish itself from an impending deluge of October genre fare. Emblematic of Blumhouse’s other digital partnerships, The Visitor is simply fine at best. It’s good for a few scares, some solid acting, and an energizing twist. Still, nothing else in its doppelgänger horror show is worth remembering much. Forget the double—it’s hard enough to remember the first.
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The Visitor
Summary
The Visitor is doppelgänger horror in more ways than one. Audiences have seen it all before.
