A safe movie by design, The Visit is suspense maestro M Night Shyamalan’s most watchable film in more than ten years. The justly prolific writer/director who got his start with the impressively assured ghost story The Sixth Sense—a classic—is nothing if not ambitious. His movies are full of ideas and on every level, playing with the conventions of style and plot like e a mad conductor and the various film departments his orchestra. (Almost) all of his movies have, if nothing else, isolated moments of brilliance and true movie making wonder, combining inspired uses of score, lighting, and composition to bring his visionary screenplays to life. That much is true, and you’ll find nary a naysayer to that effect. But that same sense of invention is what pushed him to the breaking point of indulgence, leading to masturbatory trash in the way of Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender, and After Earth, and many have been hoping for the sweet nectar of career resurgence.

The Visit is not the answer to Shyamalan’s problems as an artist, or the long-wanted apology for his fans. Exactly what made him fun to watch is missing, seemingly taking a palette cleanser approach (like Michael Bay did with Pain and Gain after a bunch of Transformers movies). Instead of the convoluted plot and in-your-face symbols of a movie like The Village, which preposterously pondered a theme of hardcore isolationism, The Visit is a stripped down boxcar of a movie and that creative choice is the source of all the film’s virtues and all of its sins. Its simplified premise is purposeful and effective but never revelatory, and ultimately, to continue my metaphor, by the nature of itself can’t accelerate to full speed. But you do have fun.

This is, in fact, a found footage movie. It’s something the marketing didn’t explicitly tell us, and Shyamalan subtly reinvents that horror subgenre in a somewhat creative way. You find out within minutes that The Visit isn’t so much found footage as much as finished footage. The movie is actually the finished documentary of one of the characters, a 15 year old girl named Becca (Olivia Dejonge), and (too) much time is spent mulling over the specifics of film aesthetics, mise-en-scene, and characters talking about camera setups. The gimmick wears out its welcome but gets points for trying something new, proving once again why horror has long been a surprisingly fertile ground for experimentation.