Shyamalan and his cinematographer, Mike Gioulakis, take every advantage of the negative space that this big open canvas provides-the camera darts between characters, bobbing and swaying, lending the sense of time rapidly falling out of reach. It’s peaceful and alluring, but unfeeling-a gorgeous spot to while away your time before being carried out by the waves and forgotten. The beach (the film was shot in the Dominican Republic) is a perfect metaphorical landscape for that question. One can almost hear him cackling in the background (and, as usual, he’s cast himself in a small role) as he continually poses this question to the audience: What would you do if you had only one day to live the rest of your life? Shyamalan riddles his characters with insecurities and doubts about their place in the world, then hits the fast-forward button on their lives, giving them minutes to realize big emotional truths. What parent hasn’t had that feeling grip them with terror? Old is a perfect, blunt title, but this film could just as easily be called They Grow Up So Fast, given the melancholy undertones of its often grisly plot. But they’re also tormented by the existential reality that their partnership-and their children’s many developmental milestones-is flashing by. In Old, Guy and Prisca, along with the other beachgoers, have to figure out an escape before their age kills them. The film, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, is maybe Shyamalan’s best since his (supremely underrated) 2004 hit, The Village. Shyamalan has made movies featuring ghosts, alien invaders, scary trees, and comic-book villains, but with Old he’s hit on a premise that is devastating in its simplicity. Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), on a sumptuous vacation with their two preteen children, arrive one morning and lay down their towels within a few hours, their kids have gone through puberty and their own faces are scored with wrinkles. The beautiful, secluded beach where Old takes place is powered by one horrifying logic: If you stay on it, you get old-fast. It’s a knowing hint at the terror that’s about to unfurl-the sense that time is about to slip out of whack. Early on in Old, his latest macabre roller-coaster ride, a trio of children play freeze tag on a beach, ducking and weaving and laughing while one of them stands motionless, waiting to spring back to life. Night Shyamalan has been making Hollywood thrillers for more than 20 years, and despite his career’s ups and downs, he’s never lost the power to wring tension out of the simplest situations: someone opening a door, a shape walking across a TV screen, a scowl shifting into a smile.
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