M. Night Shyamalan's Old has a killer premise: a group of unsuspecting beachgoers travels to a secluded, idyllic cove where they begin to age rapidly, with no means of escape. Although the film was inspired by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters' 2013 graphic novel Sandcastle, its Twilight Zone-style setup feels like just the sort of eerie concept its writer/director would conceive.
Sadly, unlike Levy and Peeters, Shyamalan doesn't seem to recognize the beauty of this premise lies in its simplicity. Instead, his script for Old tries to explain not only the mechanics of how the story's fantastical setting works but also why these particular strangers ended up in this terrifying situation. He turns what might've been a creepy yet poignant meditation on the inevitability of death into a frustrating mixed bag of a thriller with muddled execution.
Old follows married couple Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), along with their children Trent and Maddox (played by Nolan River and Alexa Swinton as children), to a luxurious tropical resort. One day at breakfast, the resort's manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) tells them about a beautiful, isolated beach that's kept secret from everyone but select guests. Intrigued, the four decide to visit the cove with an affluent surgeon named Charles (Rufus Sewell) and his family, including his much-younger wife Chrystal (Abbie Lee). They are joined by Jarin (Ken Leung), a nurse, and his partner Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a therapist with a neurological condition that causes her to have sporadic seizures.
Shyamalan, reuniting with cinematographer Mike Gioulakis for the fourth time after Split, Glass and the Apple+ series Servant, precisely foreshadows the horrors that await the guests at the beach through his use of slow, deliberate pans and ominous camera angles. Composer Trevor Gureckis, another Servant alum, creates further tension with his insidious score, which Shyamalan uses sparsely yet efficiently. Combined with the measured pacing of Brett M. Reed's editing, it's enough to leave you on-edge well before the film's characters find a dead body on the beach -- with Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), a broody, bloody-nosed rapper who was already there when they arrived, being the only person who knows what happened.
This is where Old runs into trouble. The movie's dialogue grows increasingly awkward as the beachgoers realize they've started aging a year every half-hour and try to figure out why they can't leave the cove. However, in establishing the rules of how the beach works, Shyamalan only makes things more confusing. He further convolutes the plot by introducing a mystery revolving around the resort and its ulterior motives for dooming the characters to their grim fate.
Unfortunately, while the resulting payoff (read: Shyamalan's trademark narrative twist) doesn't negate the film's themes about mortality and the human condition, it also doesn't enhance or enrich its emotional impact. Instead, by aspiring to make logical sense of its preternatural setting, the movie only raises more unnecessary questions.
What's more, the film sees Shyamalan repeating some of his worst habits as a storyteller -- like using his characters as a soapbox for dubious and regressive moralizing. The optics are equally bad when it comes to Old's unintentionally insensitive handling of race, violence, and mental illness within a key subplot.
At the same time, Shyamalan brings out genuinely moving performances from Krieps and Bernal, as Guy and Prisca wrestle with regret in the face of what seems like their inevitable demise. Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie are similarly compelling as teenage Trent and Maddox, whose minds are slower to keep up with their quickly maturing bodies. On the other hand, Sharp Objects standout Eliza Scanlen is wasted as the teenage version of Charles and Chrystal's daughter Kara, as is much of the cast.
Despite its missteps, Old boasts some excellent filmmaking and several terrific body horror sequences, including a moment that rivals Prometheus' notorious C-section scene. Following in the steps of other low-budget thrillers that Shyamalan has directed since he stepped away from the world of franchises, Old is distinctly Shyamalanesque in its mix of weirdness, terror, and philosophy. Of course, given the increased creative control the filmmaker wields over his idiosyncratic projects nowadays, this also makes Shyamalan his own worst enemy.
Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, Old begins playing in theaters on July 23.