A pair of tween siblings (Ed Oxenbould and Olivia DeJonge) film a home movie about visiting their grandparents in M. Night Shyamalan’s 2015 found footage horror flick that represents an improvement on his usual shooting style.

If the found footage format serves any purpose it is to convey a sense of reality, but nothing in The Visit is remotely believable – from the children’s precocious vocabulary (“We don’t know their temperament or their proclivities”), to the mother (Kathryn Hahn) who doesn’t bother checking her kids are being picked up by the parents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) she hasn’t seen for 15 years.

Her characterisation as a neglectful parent too busy holidaying with her new boyfriend to check on her children suggests Shyamalan does not look particularly kindly on single mothers, though his track record with elderly and mentally ill people is not much better. As well as exploiting dissociative identity disorder in Split, let’s not forget there was a scary old lady in The Happening, an elderly woman was literally the devil in Devil, and Old was an entire movie about the horror of getting old. No wonder he insists on pursuing proxy careers through his children.

Here he casts the grandmother as a witchy lunatic who crawls around saying, “I have the deep darkies” (to be fair old people aren’t always the most politically correct), yet is somehow capable enough to spill batter on the camera part of the children’s laptop without getting any on the screen. The only thing bigger than the film’s plot holes is her inexplicably large oven, which is roomy enough to fit a child.

But if you don’t find pensioners inherently scary, there is nothing even slightly menacing in The Visit. The kids are never in any danger, nor does anything actually happen, and the only way you would fail to guess the twist about 20 minutes into the movie is if you’re smart enough to turn it off before that.

The children are also about as charming as watching Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in a regional production of Hansel and Gretel. The annoying sister has no reason to film the whole time, while the brother’s insistence on rapping all the way through the movie will make you want to stick your head in the oversized oven. And if you thought Shyamalan’s dialogue was bad, get a load of his rhymes.

It is almost impressive that every Shyamalan film feels like the worst thing he’s ever done. At least this one has an excuse for looking like it was filmed by a 12-year-old.