The Visit

2015

1 hr. 30 min.

Documentary

List

67%

12 Reviews

Tomatometer

41%

100+ Ratings

Audience Score

Government agencies try to cope with humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial life.

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isabel r

Terrible. Giant waste of time. At some points it was amusing but it was horrible most of the way up to the end.

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

03/31/23

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Audience Member

Dreadfully boring. It is all in slow motion.

Rated 1 out of 5 stars

01/19/23

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Audience Member

The Art direction was this movie's only saving grace, but it became very repetitive after about 20 minutes. An entire 120 minutes watching a guy put on a hazmat suit in super slow mo, men getting in an driving around a tank, and just people walking around a city staring at the camera. It was told in a very haphazard way. Mainly talking heads sporadically sprinkled in. Would not recommend.

Rated 2 out of 5 stars

01/22/23

Full Review

Audience Member

It's Apsoltly Rubbish Sorry To Say That But It Is

Rated 0.5 out of 5 stars

01/12/23

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Audience Member

I saw this at the 2015 Cleveland International Film Festival. This documentary-style film, not a true documentary, is unique. It asks what if! Madsen interviews various government, military, and scientific personnel, mostly focusing on European space organizations and western peace organizations like NATO and the UN. What if alien life did land on Earth!? What is the official planned response of our leaders? Do we expect aliens to come in peace or to bring destruction? Will we show our baser violent nature or our higher compassionate nature to these unknown visitors? Of course this is all hypothetical and many scenes are quite surreal without ever showing an alien encounter. Like science fiction, this is all still left to our vivid imaginations. Several of the interviewees suggest a "hope for the best, but plan for the worst" scenario. It is somewhat disheartening to witness some interviewees dumbfounded in expressing their fear of this unknown. My favorite feature of this film was all the slow motion shots, some involving superimposed subjects seeming to float in the void, others simply showing everyday life interrupted when people turn to stare at something they have never seen before. My wife disliked the hypothetical and slow moving aspects of this film. The fact that there are practically no facts to stand on and no plot bothered her more than it bothered me. The narrator asks questions that an alien might ask to better understand us humans, some questions that the interview subjects also ponder about alien life, so, you see, in trying to imagine life "out there" we are really faced with looking within and attempting to make sense of ourselves.

Rated 4 out of 5 stars

02/01/23

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Michael Madsen

Director

Mazlan Othman

Self

Paul Beaver

Self

Janos Tisovszky

Self

Michael Boyce

Self

Niklas Hedman

Self

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Leslie Felperin

Guardian

An amused but never mocking look at how we would handle things if beings from another planet landed on Earth.

Rated: 3/5

Jan 21, 2016

Full Review

Tom Huddleston

Time Out

Feels like a Calvin Klein advert directed by a lobotomised Professor Brian Cox.

Rated: 1/5

Jan 19, 2016

Full Review

Sheri Linden

Los Angeles Times

At first feels like a bizarre exercise in conjecture or a brainstorming session for fiction writers, but it turns into a provocative and moving philosophical inquiry.

Oct 1, 2015

Full Review

C.J. Prince

Way Too Indie

Madsen's choice to take the alien's perspective falls flat on its face from frame one, a mistake the film never fully recovers from.

Rated: 4/10

Aug 23, 2019

Full Review

Allie Gemmill

CineVue

For a film built completely on the discussion of hypothetical situations, this documentary is impressive and engrossing to a fault.

Rated: 4/5

Apr 8, 2019

Full Review

Matt Looker

Total Film

With stunning otherworldly imagery accompanying the deeply philosophical debate, The Visit pleases the eye as much as the brain.

Rated: 4/5

Jan 2, 2017

Full Review

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Synopsis

Government agencies try to cope with humanity's first contact with extraterrestrial life.

Director: Michael Madsen
Screenwriter: Michael Madsen
Production Co: Magic Hour Films ApS
Genre: Documentary
Original Language: English
Release Date (Streaming): Aug 10, 2016

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