The master of unexpected twists invites us to the cinema again to surprise us. But it’s hard to be surprised or even show interest while watching “Old.”

The film “Old” was based on the graphic novel “Sandcastle” by screenwriter Pierre Oscar Lévy and artist Frederik Peeters. M. Night Shyamalan took the idea of characters stranded on a mysterious beach where they age and die rapidly, but rewrote the ending. In the spirit of his famous trademark — the plot twist.

Time is relentless

According to the film’s plot, on the verge of a breakup, Guy and Prisca decide to take one last vacation together with their children. An obliging hotel worker on a tropical island offers them a unique service: a getaway on a wild beach with pristine water and no crowds — an offer few receive.

Several families join our heroes and find themselves on a mystical beach. The trip that promised a paradise vacation turns into a trap, because time on this beach flows much faster than in ordinary life, and in one day you can live an entire lifetime. Added to this is an unexpected discovery — the corpse of a woman washed ashore.

All attempts to escape the beach are futile — anyone who tries to go through the rocks loses consciousness. The nervous tension and the situation the characters find themselves in prevent rational thinking, and soon the viewer realizes that not only the place is dangerous, but the people themselves.

Philosophical reflections on the relentlessness of time are voiced several times by the characters in “Old,” but the philosophy and ideology go nowhere, each time abruptly interrupted by clumsy attempts to veer into thriller, horror, and sci-fi, and sometimes Shyamalan even steps into body horror territory. But only with the tip of his toe, cautiously, and immediately “pulls his foot back.”

Questions for the cinematographer

Strange cinematographic choices, unconvincing makeup, and poor CGI are disorienting. Mike Gioulakis (the cinematographer) opts for peculiar angles, panning, and avoids showing the physiological horrors happening to the characters on camera. The viewer can only guess what is happening by reading the emotions on the characters’ faces.

Why in one case we see quite nauseating shots of a rapidly changing body from blood poisoning, while in another the cinematographer is shy about showing the mangled body of a girl who fell from a great height, is unclear. Or he shows in detail how one of the heroines’ bones break and then heal incorrectly, and what a monster she ultimately becomes, but in another scene he is too modest to show a body decomposed to the bone.

However, successful cinematographic solutions can also be found in “Old.” For example, the way a couple of adults amusingly react to the children’s account of their age. The shot is framed so that the viewer does not see the children, only hears what they say and how the adults react to it. Thus, the viewer becomes not just a witness to the events, but seems to exist within the picture, because they are just as bewildered as the characters and also do not understand what is happening.

The tracking camera at the beginning of the film also works in the creators’ favor. We do not examine the hotel rooms with the characters; we watch the events from outside the windows, as if spying on the characters without violating their personal boundaries. However, this does not last long; then Shyamalan chooses such extreme close-ups and such sharp angles that the viewer immediately feels uncomfortable and wants to go somewhere open. The director provides that opportunity in the very next moment. Sound helps him with this, not least.

Excellent sound design

The viewer, along with the characters, finds themselves on an incredibly beautiful beach, where the sound of the waves will constantly remind them of the setting and the fact that it is impossible to escape from this beach. The voices of the characters were also handled originally: as they age, children’s voices break, acquire adult intonations, become brighter and louder. The voices of adults, on the contrary, become duller and quieter as they age. Such meticulous work with sound by the director is admirable. But in the Russian version of the film, these interesting finds were mercilessly ruined by dubbing.

And again a twist

Shyamalan is a master of unexpected twists. To some extent, his name is already a brand. Hearing it, the viewer roughly knows what to expect. However, this trademark of the director is his weak point, not his strong one. In the director’s best works, it changes the impression of the entire film, while in all others it only exacerbates an already shaky situation.

So in the film “Old,” the director takes a quite interesting concept, develops it, but either fears stepping onto the path of arthouse or does not want to distance himself from the mass audience, and as a result, the development is cut short and nothing remains engaging except the concept. It is sad to see that Shyamalan does not trust his audience and either considers them stupid, repeating ideas and messages several times through different characters, or in an attempt to make the film more mainstream, forgets that the audience does not leave their brains in the cloakroom along with their outerwear before entering the theater.

Trailer: