The latest from M. Night Shyamalan is a gleefully spooky return to form.

c/o mindframetheaters.com

Do you chuckle at the sight of saggy, naked grandmothers scraping walls, their low lit, aged cheeks, to the camera, swaying back and forth in feverish excitement? Or of grandfathers smooshing day-old diapers on their nephews? If so, then “The Visit” may be for you. When I heard that Oscar nomineee M. Night Shyamalan was making a low-budget horror comedy, my biggest fear going into the film was that, while there may be a few laughs and cheap scares along the way, ultimately I would not care about the characters’ outcomes. Well, fear not. While not nearly as original as “The Sixth Sense,” nor as innovative as the pre-Marvel superhero flick “Unbreakable,” “The Visit” is certainly a step up from the horridly laughable trifecta of “The Happening,” “The Last Airbender,” and “After Earth;” a twist that not even Shyamalan himself could have predicted.

The plot is simple enough. An energetic and loving mom (Kathryn Hahn) sends her two kids, Becca and Tyler (Olivia DeJonge and Ed Oxenbould) to visit her estranged parents (Deanna Dunagan and Peter McRobbie) while she spends time on a cruise ship with her new boyfriend. Becca hopes to uncover the reason that her mother eloped with her high school English teacher. She also seeks to repair the rift between mother and grandmother and possibly to reunite the entire family. The documentary she makes of her and her brother’s time with their long lost grandparents, she figures, will be preserve the memory. It’s “The Parent Trap” by way of “Grimm’s Fairy Tales.”

Any audience member can tell that something is awry once the kids arrive off the train to find their two grandparents standing uncannily far off in the background, almost a blur, as if it’s unnatural for them to be around the other people at the station. Even more horrifying, after a few moments of catchup, the kids find that the grandma doesn’t even know who One Direction is.

Whenever a film’s two main characters are kids, you know that the director is going to have a hard time. But DeJonge and Oxenbould  do work off each other astoundingly well like modern Hansel and Gretel. Becca’s self-esteem issues (she can’t even look at herself in the mirror) and Tyler’s obliviousness and painful, increasingly convoluted rationalizations for why his father left them (along with his rapping aspirations) make the viewer empathize with them even more. In one of the scarier scenes, my heart pounded every second as the two kids played a friendly game of hide-and-seek under the house only to be caught off guard by their maniacal grandmother, who chases them around like she’s a cracked-up spider.

Thanks in part to Becca’s interest in filmmaking, reverential cinematographer Maryse Alberti is able to distract audiences from a somewhat thin plot and the derivative notion (enforced by the grandparents) that the kids shouldn’t go into the basement. The transition shots between days are picturesque. The full moon sits behind the silhouetted birch trees and, at times, time-lapsed clouds akin in style and tone to James Hawkinson’s work on the recently ended “Hannibal” grasp the foreboding imagery Shyamalan intended, especially juxtaposed with the final day’s transition shots of sharp ridges and hooks jutting out from all angles of the frame. The sound editing works well too, with sound bites of creaking doors, harrowing wind, and scratching against walls. The moments featuring show tunes juxtaposed with the decrepit basement shots fit the light horror-comedy tone perfectly.

The Pennsylvania setting may remind audiences of “The Sixth Sense,” but aside from that, the movie feels original. Shyamalan’s hint of a Shyamalanian twist only shocks for a brief moment, and once it reveals the true nature of the situation, there is not much left in which to indulge. It certainly does not flip the entire plot on its head, only slightly tilts it, leaving the viewers with somewhat of an anticlimax. Even odder, at the film’s denouement, the mother is interviewed again, now a changed woman.

Though “The Visit” isn’t likely to generate quite as much laughter as “The Happening,” it is undeniably humorous. What’s more, this new picture is the first time in years that the audience has a chance to laugh with Shyamalan as opposed to at him. It’s actually quite refreshing. “The Visit” is not completely barren of some of the auteur’s more absurd sensibilities, including a joke involving the a bizarre twist on celebrity name-dropping that the writer-director is oddly committed to, even with increasingly diminishing returns.

Overall, “The Visit” should appeal to fans of the director’s early work, especially those who, against all odds, have been waiting for an opportunity to give Shyamalan a second chance. Much like “The Sixth Sense” and the first half of “The Village,” “The Visit” invests a great deal of energy into building character and atmosphere, which is pulled off when the diaper hits the fan in the wake of the third act. “The Visit” doesn’t entirely upend Shyamalan’s downward trajectory, but it’s a strong, wacky, energetic indication that the director isn’t on his last leg just yet. In fact, he may be able to twist us all a few more times.