Robert (Finn Jones) and Maia (Jessica McNamee) move to her childhood home together after a series of tragedies. He discovers old portraits in the attic that include a man who identically resembles him, referred to as “The Visitor.” He gets the sense that things aren’t right, though Maia does everything she can to reassure him and encourages him to take his meds. Despite her efforts, Robert embarks on a hunt to discover the identity of the figure in the portraits, resulting in multiple deaths and the unraveling of family secrets.
Also in the cast of The Visitor are Victoria Harris, Donna Biscoe, Thomas Francis Murphy, Shanna Forrestall, and more. It’s written by Simon Boys and Adam Mason and directed by Justin P. Lange.
“This is the first film I directed that I didn’t write,” commented Lange, “I think initially, the thing that excited me was the sort of hints of Rosemary’s Baby and The Wicker Man in the script… it just hit me when I was reading it… but I also like films that play with structure and make the walls a bit more elastic than the genre box… it sort of started and felt like a haunted house film, but then it starts to veer into an area I hadn’t explored before.”
Directing Finn Jones as Robert and Doppelgänger
Jones portrays Robert in the film, a man trying to uncover the mystery of his doppelgänger, and is therefore tasked with a layered performance from the duality of it all. When asked what he was looking for from the performance, Lange commented that he saw “Robert and Maia as tragic characters.”
“To some extent, with Robert, he’s just a sort of nice, normal guy who comes into this world and is being pulled back toward something that he doesn’t have any control over. He doesn’t know what he’s being pulled toward, but he’s consumed by it. What I think we were exploring was really having him be softer, a nice guy who just sort of wants to be a supportive partner to his wife, but who clearly has some personal struggles. As the movie starts to go further, he gets more and more consumed by this riddle, and some of the toxicity in him starts to come out,” explained Lange.
There’s a ceremony at the end of the film that was really expressive and fun to shoot. It felt like everybody was excited… For me as a filmmaker, it was so outside of what I’ve done before, and I’m excited to see how people react.
Capturing that required on-set collaboration between Lange, Jones, and McNamee as they did their best to capture the truth in every scene.
“I was running around… so, lucky for me, they just had this great chemistry… they both had different approaches and preparation styles, but it sort of just worked really well for the characters in the movie. The most important part was that they were both game to explore and try things. I always think the most exciting things about movies is discovery, or the process, and so that was gratifying to be working with them as open as they were,” said Lange.
Making Choices in The Visitor
As for what allowed them to capture the truth in each scene, Lange explained that he’s an instinctual filmmaker, and it required a bit of testing and varying takes.
“It’s something that Finn probably learned along the way working with me, is that I’m an instinctual filmmaker. I plan a lot, I always work with storyboards and do a lot of prep, but I do prep so that I can change it… That’s what I find exciting, is to get on set and see Finn do something that I didn’t think of and be like, ‘That’s it. That’s what we need.’ And then let’s build from that. It’s nowhere in my prep, but I have that base to work from,” said Lange.
Lange continued, crediting Finn’s preparation as an aspect that allowed them to work so fluidly together: “Finn is also really prepared, and he had a lot of input in his character. We walk talk beforehand, we would show up and block it out, and we’d have questions or want to change things and build out from it. And that being the thing if you have actors that are open to that process, it can be really exciting. You can find things that you didn’t think of when you read it or were prepping. It feels immediate, and it really brings something new and different to the material.”
The Visitor will be on digital and on demand on October 7, 2022, and on EPIX in December.
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