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“They Grow Up So Fast” is a comfortable parenting platitude with a terrible truth lurking behind it, like a mask pulled over a smiling skull. Saying the euphemistic words out loud is to recognize the bitter ephemeral of life – the fact that before you know it, your cute kids will be adults with thinning hair and drooping bellies, rushing towards it. forgetting just a step behind you. This grim reality looms as tall as a blazing sun on Old woman, the new supernatural thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Set largely on a secluded, unnatural expanse of sand and water where everyone ages at an accelerated rate, the film has flashes of awkwardness that should be familiar to those who have already entered the Twilight Zone of the imagination of its creator. Corn Old woman is also, in its most intense moments, one of its most disturbing visions: a horror film about the most universal of horrors, inevitable mortality.
In his latest photo, the somewhat unfairly derided A glassSeriously, eccentrically meditated Shyamalan on the myth of comics. This time, he was inspired by a real comic: French comics Sand castle, from which he borrows a basic plot but not a stylistic strategy. (The lush greens and shimmering crystalline blues here are a far cry from the austere black-and-white imagery of Frederik Peeters’ oeuvre.) Source material aside, the film feels distinctly Shyamalan from the jump, perhaps especially in his hiccups. Old woman starts off badly, with a series of awkward exhibition scenes featuring Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Phantom thread‘s Vicky Krieps), traveling with their children, Maddox (Alexa Swinton), 11, and Trent (Nolan River), 6, to a tropical resort. “You have a beautiful voice,” mom says to her daughter. And then, in the first case of ominous foreshadowing: “I can’t wait to hear it when you’re older.”
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Over the next two decades The sixth sense making him a household name, Shyamalan didn’t improve much in writing the dialogue. Its characters always speak a stilted language of brutal emotional statement and cheesy lines, periodically sounding like aliens moving closer to human interaction. But in Old woman, the anti-naturalistic noise of the exchanges finally begins to contribute to the overall nightmare vibe of Shyamalan’s script. At the manager’s suggestion, the family ends up taking off for a private swim across the island, joining a small group of other guests that includes a racist surgeon (Rufus Sewell), his bombshell wife (Abbey Lee) , their grade- school-aged daughter (Kylie Begley), a SoundCloud rapper (Aaron Pierre) and a few others. “Something is happening with time on this beach,” one of them vaguely and belatedly infers, long after adults have started collecting wrinkles and their children have started running into puberty at high speed. record.
It is about as close to pure allegory as Shyamalan ever went astray. Its withering beach is nothing less than life itself as a physical space, with every step and humiliation of the aging process crammed into one terribly condensed day. As symbolic as this premise may be, the film reveals several visceral and diabolical dilemmas: Emergency surgery is complicated by the fact that the wounds heal in seconds, while the onset of dementia is horribly accelerated, a running gag on a movie that a character can’t remember quickly turning into sheer hostile confusion. The central sequence of the film, shot in a long shot that goes back and forth across the sand, grotesquely exaggerates the ordinary mind of parents passing on the torch of parenthood. With Old woman, Shyamalan gives a fantastic twist to the subjective brevity of youth; in this case, it is not only appear just like yesterday that the children were only children. But he also generously acknowledges the cognitive dissonance of growing up too – a child’s own shock at the new “colors,” as Maddox puts it, blossoming in their brains.
Visually, it’s a tour de force, even by the standards of a director who finds inventive angles on the action in almost all of his films, from the biggest to the silliest to the silliest. The camera rotates, hides and looms, enhancing the disorientation of seasickness. This is the third film that Shyamalan has directed with Mike Gioulakis, who shot his To divide and A glass. Is there a cinematographer today who draws more threat from composition alone? Gioulakis sometimes hovers the threat just below or beyond the frame, teasing us with what is invisible. He understands his role in guiding (and limiting) an audience’s perspective – a key tenet of Shyamalan’s work, fraught with misdirection and late revelations. Old womanIllusions are more analog than digital: while the film deploys variably convincing makeup effects (and a bit of macabre CGI), it relies just as much on a good cast. Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie, who play the prematurely advanced versions of children, have a slightly ageless quality; they convince both teenagers and old people that they become quickly.
In a Shyamalan film, awkwardness always waits at the gates, threatening to overturn the fears. Depending on who you ask, that’s a big flaw in his work or part of his idiosyncratic charm. Either way, there are times when Old womanthe defenses of are violated; a bit of body horror involving dislocated bones borders on the absurd slapstick, maybe on purpose. Less forgivable, the last passage of the film is too neat, in a purely Hollywood way. It lacks the more haunting fatalism of the original comic, which knew there was only one sane way for this story to end. Yet the power of vanity persists, reinforced in some way by the impression that Shyamalan, a middle-aged man with three daughters, is exorcising his own fears, though of course they are ours and everyone else’s. also. Old woman does not content itself with reconfirming its talent to put shivers down the spine of film-loving audiences. It also proves that this multiplex wizarding craftsman knows a thing or two about the human condition, even as the basics of human conversation continue to elude him.
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