Former review: M. Night Shyamalan returns with a record-breaking but haunting thriller

Few things are more delicious than a movie with one big, silly concept that sinks into the ground. Ground? Who needs it! Character development? Useless. The ship sinks and everyone has to get off; huge man-eating ants or giant earth-shaking worms threaten humanity; the zombies are heading this way. Movies like this conjure up a world in which everything is a bit crazy and absurd. No matter who you are, you could live a long and fulfilling life, or you could get trampled by a dinosaur. The human condition, in two hours.

Old woman, the latest thriller from the endlessly inventive – if not always successful – director M. Night Shyamalan, spends much of his time being this kind of film. It doesn’t hurt to say that this is a movie where sudden, uncontrollable aging is the problem (just look at the title), and the characters are preoccupied with figuring out how to escape it.

That said, if you want to avoid real spoilers, bow out now.

The reason for aging is not entirely clear – it seems be caused by the beach Old womanare the characters on vacation, or maybe a cliff surrounding it? Anyway, as aging comes for all of us, so it comes, at an accelerated rate, for those who have arrived in this little cove in search of a refreshing day by the water. There’s Guy (Gael García Bernal) and his wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps), whose marriage is on the rocks, and their two young children: Trent, 6 (Nolan River) and his 11-year-old sister Maddox (Alexa Swinton) ). Jarin (Ken Leung), a nurse, is also there, as is his wife psychiatrist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Another family completes the group: a doctor (Rufus Sewell), his beautiful wife (Abbey Lee), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and Kara, 6 (Kylie Begley).

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All of the party members are staying at a nearby resort and were taken to the secluded beach by one of the resort employees. (According to tradition, Shyamalan himself plays this role.) When they arrive on the beach, there is only one other person, sitting crouched and silent near the giant cliff that looms above it. . Maddox, to his delight, admits him: he’s a rapper, and in perhaps the film’s most delightful twist, his stage name is “Mid-Sized Sedan.” (He’s played by Aaron Pierre, who was devastating as Caesar in Amazon’s recent miniseries The Underground Railroad.)

They set up their coolers and chairs and sit down for a while, but then things start to get… weird. Really weird. They find a body, much to their horror. A small benign tumor in Prisca’s abdomen begins to grow. The doctor starts to say strange things. Injuries do not act properly. Leaving the beach seems impossible. Children enter adolescence without warning. (They are played, at different ages, by Luca Faustino Rodriguez, Mikaya Fisher, Little womanit’s Eliza Scanlen, Hereditaryis Alex Wolff, and Leaves no traceby Thomasin McKenzie.)

there are several of them love by the way Old woman, especially its slow and measured movement. The film creates a vast landscape of sunny, sweaty terror. Shyamalan’s peculiar visual sense, which favors unexpected framing producing interesting images, is fully visible, even when hampered by the fact that the characters are simply on a beach, with little to look at that is not in. the background. For much of the movie, the characters have figured out what is happening to them, although they don’t know why, and the action is limited to their attempts to escape the island or the inevitable.

But it’s also the epitome of an “your mileage may vary” experience. Shyamalan hasn’t become more adept at writing dialogue over the years, and although stilted dialogue can work under certain circumstances (in the years 2004 The village, that ultimately made sense), it doesn’t pay off here. It’s not Old womanThe constant exposure is as much the problem as the endless and awkward over-explanation. Do children really need to be told what their parents mean when they shout “Run! Hide!”?

This scenario (or perhaps the wrong direction) seems to tie the hands of Old womanis very well molded behind their back. In the film’s best moments, however, I found myself thinking about Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film. The exterminating angel, in which a group of wealthy people find themselves trapped in a living room, mysteriously unable to escape as their psyche, relationships, and veneer of civilization slowly disintegrate. This film is downright allegorical and obviously satirical, surreal in a way that haunts even after its end. His refusal to really explain what is going on is disturbing.

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In his last act and the following coda, Old woman becomes more sentimental, more of a family drama than the movie seemed to be at first – and then all of a sudden it turns into something like science fiction. The change isn’t exactly a twist, but in an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it’s not unexpected. You know as you walk in that there will be more to the story, that you will eventually find out what happens with… old age. This is why the trailer for the film shows so much of his hand; he knows that the public will be intrigued by all that is Actually event. This guy led The sixth sense, after all. There must be an explanation.

There is, indeed, an explanation – but I kinda wish there wasn’t. For most Old woman, the sheer quirk of the setup is what is so compelling. The film is loosely based on the graphic novel Sand castle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, which has a rather different ending to the film and which, for my money, is more satisfying.

While logic Old woman makes sense, I can imagine a better movie that ends 20 minutes earlier and gives fewer responses, leaving us with more of the disturbing and wistful sadness that always accompanies stories about aging and mortality. I think of movies like She dies tomorrow, who don’t bother to offer explanations and therefore, I would say, better imitate what they are trying to evoke: the absurdity and the tragedy of life.

By rotating the plot and then explaining it meticulously, Old woman is the Shyamalan peak – a little sentimental, a little surprising, a little laborious. Compared to his recent films like A glass and To divide, it is still strangely stripped, a mode that suits him well. And the times when Old woman is shifting into high gear are fun to watch and disturbing.

Being old is not, in and of itself, worse or better than being young. Yet the feeling that time is running out, that the sand in the hourglass is falling quickly, is going to cause existential angst in the best of us. When one of the Old womanThe characters lament, at one point, that it’s just not right that they missed so many stages in life because of this beach, they’re not wrong. Frankly, after the pandemic year we’ve just been through – and given the looming uncertainty of the future – who can’t understand?

So at its best, Old woman tap into something primitive. Isn’t life ultimately a top-notch horror movie, in which the concept is that we’re all going to die?

Old woman is currently in theaters.