With a cast worthy of Agatha Christie, this tale of a resort where time has been terrifyingly accelerated is brilliantly poised between serious and silly
M Night Shyamalan is enjoying some serious mojo-recovery with his best film since The Sixth Sense: a woozy high-concept horror about being trapped on an apparently idyllic private beach, where time is fatally accelerated. Anyone who dislikes overheated beach holidays will probably already know the feeling of supernaturally rapid ageing, horror and face-shrivelling panic. And in fact these are the feelings I’ve often had watching some of Shyamalan’s recent films.
This is different. Old is an enthrallingly bizarre piece of old-fashioned entertainment: adapted by Shyamalan from the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters; it is exactly suited to Shyamalan’s talent for a particular kind of audacious, ingenious hokum. But unlike his mysteries The Village or The Happening, where Shyamalan appeared to lose his grip on the steering wheel halfway through (or earlier), the enjoyably preposterous yet creepy premise is maintained to the finish line. Old is a bit like Alex Garland’s The Beach, but with a dab of Twilight Zone creepiness and an ensemble cast that Agatha Christie might have imagined. Most of all, I found myself thinking that this could have come from the original series of Star Trek – and that at any moment, William Shatner might beam down among the panicky, deteriorating beach-dwellers, phaser at the ready. Sadly for them, however, these existentially stricken vacationers are on their own.