Old is M Night Shyamalan at his best: ambitious, abrasive and surprisingly poignant

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In August 2002, Newsweek boldly anointed the sternly faced man pictured on the front cover of its splashy summer issue as “The Next Spielberg”. While some might have called this an unfair comparison to one of cinema’s most legendary figures, for a then 31-year-old M Night Shyamalan, it was a childhood dream come true. The Indian-born, Pennsylvanian-raised film-maker had whetted his cinematic appetite on the images of Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and for better or worse, would find himself chasing that same level of stratospheric fame in the early days of his career.

Despite the initial acclaim of The Sixth Sense, though, Shyamalan’s reputation and audience goodwill would soon begin to nosedive as his idiosyncratic directing style increasingly rubbed against the grander ambitions of his movies. But after a temporary exodus from Hollywood and a retreat to his roots in independent cinema, Shyamalan finally returned to studio film-making in 2021 with the release of Old: a masterful high-concept thriller that rekindled the director’s longtime fascination with family, parenting and the mystifying possibility of the unknown.

Unfolding over the course of a single day, Old follows a group of several families and strangers who realise that the secluded cove they’ve travelled to for a supposedly idyllic vacation is in fact ageing them by several years in a mere matter of hours, with any attempts made to leave the beach resulting in a dizzying blackout.

With an eerie sense of isolation hanging over the proceedings – no doubt a result of the film’s Covid bubble shoot in the Dominican Republic – Shyamalan spends a good chunk of the first act hammering out the story’s key players. Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and Guy Cappa (Gael García Bernal) are in the midst of separating when they decide to take their two young children on what might be their final family holiday, after it’s recently discovered that Prisca has a slow-growing ovarian tumour. They are soon joined at the beach by a host of other peculiar personalities riddled with their own ailments, including schizophrenic surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell), his hypocalcaemic trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and perhaps most amusingly, haemophilic rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre).

A man standing on a beach near a large cliff

While the picturesque locale provides some momentary reprieve for the Cappa family, it doesn’t take long for hijinks to ensue. Shyamalan wastes no time in exploiting his ensembles’ afflictions, crafting a series of heart-racing sequences that demonstrate how the beach’s supernatural powers are exacerbating their individual maladies. After the accelerated passage of time causes Prisca’s tumour to rapidly grow in one horrifying scene, Charles must lead the group in removing the lump from her body whilst suffering from his own mental episode that has been aggravated by the intensified ageing.

It’s all familiar territory for Shyamalan, who often exposes his characters to inexplicable events in order to shed light on their personal dilemmas. Whether it be the mysterious crop circles in Signs or the superpowered individuals of the Unbreakable-verse, his films brim with difficult truths coated in genre tropes. In Old, watching a child morph into an adult and seeing their body falter in minutes taps into the deeply human illusion of ageing as a slow, creeping process that we ignore over time until it becomes undeniably real.

A man covered with a dirty or decaying face holding his hands up to his head

Of course, it wouldn’t be a true Shyamalan movie without one of his signature plot twists, and when the coin finally drops in Old – courtesy of a cheeky cameo from the director himself – the film broadens out to question how far society is willing to go in the name of progress. While there are echoes of The Twilight Zone, Cronenbergian body horror and indeed the sentimental sensibilities of Spielberg throughout its runtime, Old retains a voice that’s uniquely Shyamalan’s: earnest, ambitious and unafraid to be abrasive. In a landscape crowded with franchise fare and IP slop, it reaffirms his role as a film-maker who swings big – and just like his childhood idol, one who is able to withstand the tides of change.