Old

 

M. Night Shyamalan may not always hit it out of the park but he always swings for the fences. The auteur of twisty thrillers evokes eye-rolls from many serious movie goers, but I'm usually entertained by the audacity of his ideas -- when they work and when they don't.

"Old" doesn't work completely -- the dialogue is stilted and implausibility (something Shyamalan is rarely burdened by) rules the day -- but it's not as bungled as other pictures in Shyamalan's oeuvre. Maybe having source material kept the movie from going off the rails.

In the film, a group of resort vacationers are taken to a secluded beach to spend the day. Soon, the youngsters in the group begin to show signs of aging, the oldsters start dying, minds get muddy, wrinkles settle into brows, and hearing and vision begin to fade. And there's no way to leave.

Shyamalan is a stagey creeper who knows how to balance nuance and grotesquerie, so his films are not full-blown horror blood-fests but they have enough gruesome spiciness to jolt callous viewers and enough out-of-frame suggestiveness to unnerve the rest.

"Old" cast is led by Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps as a feuding couple and parents to two children. It is through this quartet that much of the movie is told and through whom the big reveal is delivered.