Writer and director M. Night Shyamalan kicked off the 2020s with his 2021 existential thriller Old, a unique horror movie that was conceptually and thematically among the richest films he’s made. For a director who has toyed with the lightly supernatural before, most notably in his breakout The Sixth Sense and his much-derided 2008 film The Happening, Old lets him work out something very different: a beach that causes rapid aging, forcing a family that’s hiding devastating news from their kids to confront mortality. Like many of Shyamalan’s films, it’s a story of parenthood and coming into contact with the unknown. Based on the French graphic novel Sandcastle, it’s also very odd, reminiscent of one of the greatest television shows of all time.
Shyamalan’s filmmaking, especially in the last decade, has largely dispensed with big budgets and Hollywood spectacle for single-location movies with killer high concepts. In that way, it’s not far off from The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling’s 1960s sci-fi horror anthology series, which frequently dealt with the absurd, macabre, and deeply ironic. While it frequently defied expectations, a standard Twilight Zone episode might play like the 2026 film Obsession, letting a wish be granted only for the unforeseen contours of the wish to destroy the grantee. Also, it might conjure a world of oppression that resembles our own but with a single supernatural twist, exploring the human condition in a very particular context. Shyamalan’s best work (including Old) lives in that space, and he even cited the show as an inspiration for the stylistic and narrative risks he took in the film.
‘Old’ Has Shyamalan’s Most Disturbing Horror Concept
Old begins innocuously, with a family on vacation (not too different from M. Night Shyamalan’s follow-up, 2023’s Knock at the Cabin). While parents Prisca and Guy (Vicky Krieps andGael García Bernal) are hiding news of their impending separation from their young children, this tropical island trip is intended to serve as a balm, to assure the kids that things will be fine. Just like most viewers of Shyamalan’s films, they can’t guess what happens next, as their beach day makes it clear that they have no idea how much time they actually have left. Camping out on the beach with these characters, Shyamalan uses the wide open vistas of the Dominican Republic to paradoxically isolate them. With the film’s bubble production coming at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also ended up reflecting the general malaise and unease of pandemic life, of being stuck in one location as time is simultaneously standing still and accelerating.
On the beach that makes you old (which practically became the movie’s tagline in online circles), the characters age roughly one year every 30 minutes, so within six hours, the kids have become grown-ups.Shyamalan takes the premise as far as it can go as the adults’ illnesses worsen and everyone’s grip on reality unravels. Condensing the whole of the human experience to one 90-minute thriller like this is different from something like the 2009 Pixar classic Up — it makes the fear of age and mortality inescapable and rapid. The movie’s most memorable horrors take advantage of the fact that its leads are mentally children in adult bodies, and of Chrystal’s (Abbey Lee) sped-up hypocalcemia, as her bones grow weaker and weaker. Shyamalan’s use of the family unit in this filmresults in a horror movie that is less moralistic and more observant, a bit like how the visceral enjoyment of his 2024 filmTrapdepended on your wanting the serial killer to get away with it.
‘Old’ Comes Closest to Capturing ‘The Twilight Zone’
Discussing the film on what was then Twitter, M. Night Shyamalan directly cited The Twilight Zone as an inspiration for Old (on top of other classic movies, like Nicolas Roeg’s similarly existential thriller Walkabout). But in the show, a character might learn their lesson as their desires lead to tragic outcomes. The movie is more purely experiential, capturing the messed-up scenarios of the show and bringing them to horrifying cinematic life. Some of the less famous (but no less poignant) Twilight Zone episodes (Static, Kick the Can) feature nostalgic characters doing everything they can to continue living in the past, but Old doesn’t even give its characters time to appreciate the present. By hyper-accelerating the lives of its characters, M. Night Shyamalan gets to explore every side of the family unit (sometimes in ways that critics might ding for being a little clunky).
Of course, like in most Twilight Zone episodes and Shyamalan films, there is a twist at the end of Old, one of the movie’s weakest aspects. For a movie that turns the fear of mortality into a runaway train, the resolution is ultimately a little pat and easy. But in terms of capturing the high-concept sci-fi thrills of The Twilight Zone, with a healthy dose of that show’s social commentary and irony, Old is maybe the highest achiever in a long line of movies.
