Starring: Richard Jenkins, Haaz Sleiman, Danai Jekesai Gurira, Hiam Abbass

Directed By: Thomas McCarthy

Scenes from the movie

Sometimes we keep struggling trying to find a voice, and we fail to look at what is around us. We are so sucked in our environment, when it begins to give us a sort of harmony to our lives. It is in the smallest of gestures that we see our lives being totally transformed. These gestures don’t really grow with time but their spans can be really smaller than you think. I really don’t know if my feelings will take the better of this review, but I’ll try my best.

Visitor is a film with unforgettable performances from its principal cast headed by the towering Richard Jenkins. There is really nothing left to prove for this man with his sky like performance in the Six Feet Under series. In this he plays a man conflicted with his own existence. He is really not looking for anything. The stale faces of life begin to circle around his everyday chores. These faces seem to saturate his character to a point of no return. You begin to feel sorry for his withering spirit. But then suddenly things begin to impose into his life. Richard Jenkins plays Walter, who discovers a couple has taken up residence in his apartment in the city while he was staying away from it.

Now here is the trick the director keeps playing. He doesn’t give us characters sketch unless it is really necessary something, which I have grown to adore in many movies. It gives us time to think of what might have happened to this solitary man. Everything in his demeanor feels like a heart wrenching loss that has torn him. The visitors begin to slowly create a world around them. But it is soon destroyed by the dictates of their society. It is here that things begin to slowly take shape in Walter’s character. The Visitor here is not just the people but more to do with the feelings Walter begins to experience. The film does have an uplifting quality that makes really endearing. But the credit for this should be given to the director, whose cinematic language is terse. It doesn’t mean this is an absurd movie or something. But Tom Mccarthy seems to draw very little from an interaction, this makes for really thoughtful viewing.

I also feel the movie has a third visitor which is music. It begins to slowly creep into each of these people’s lives bringing out wafer thin like sketches. Music even makes these actors feel so comfortable and create some beautiful sequences. But the message in the film is handled so fearlessly that the director doesn’t shy away from showing some anger. It is in that moment that we see true craftsmanship on the part of the director, who took the story all the way. Thank you for that Mr McCarthy.

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