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Tom McCarthy’s first feature film, The Station Agent, was memorable. A man who feels alienated by society takes up residence in an abandoned railway station, but there’s two people who persist in barging into his solitude and making him enjoy life once again. In his new film, The Visitor, McCarthy has again brought together disparate people in the middle of nowhere, even though this time it is a New York apartment. There are four strangers struggling to deal with a changing world – the dispirited old man, the young couple from other parts of the world and a sophisticated older woman.
Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) is the grumpy old man who has lost his passion for life. He is a widowed economics professor who lives in Connecticut and occasionally travels to his apartment in New York. On one of these occasions, he finds a young Syrian man Tarek (Haaz Sleiman) and his Senegalese girlfriend Zainab (Danai Gurira) have taken up residence as the result of a real estate scam. Surprisingly, he allows them to stay as they have nowhere to go. In turn they enrich his life until an unfortunate turn of events lands Tarek in custody. Tarek’s mother Mouna (Haim Abbass) appears in search of her son and they all battle the US immigration authorities.
McCarthy believes that it not only the huge moments in our lives that make it interesting, the little decisions that we make often take us in completely different directions. The Visitor is a humorous, tragic and ultimately magic insight into the lives of people who are not that different to us, but whose lives are worlds apart.
Rated M, directed by Tom McCarthy
