Poorly-written characters struggle with ill-defined terrors in a muddled mess of a thriller
The gulf between M. Night Shyamalan’s good films and his bad ones is now so broad that it seems impossible to believe that they’re made by the same writer-director, were they not so aggressively similar in so many other ways than quality. To say that “Old” is better than “Glass” is not much of a compliment, but it’s also woefully inferior to “Unbreakable” and “Signs,” much less “The Sixth Sense,” whose success and twist-ending structure he will likely never live down. Adapted from “Sandcastle,” a 2010 graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, Shyamalan’s latest indeed features a whole lot of mystery, misdirection, and a last-minute surprise that upends everything the audience thinks they know. But the filmmaker’s diminishing capacity for recognizing naturalistic human behavior once again presents a problem when the time comes for audiences to relate to, much less care about, characters put through the paces of another elevator pitch that he never develops into a compelling story. Vicky Krieps, woefully underused (in American films, anyway) since Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” plays Prisca Capa, a museum curator who takes a family vacation with her husband Guy (Gael García Bernal) in order to soften the imminent blow of their separation to their children Maddox (Alexa Swinton, “Billions”) and Trent (Nolan River). The tropical resort attends to all of their most specific needs, starting with personalized cocktails passed out upon arrival, and on Day Two, a special trip to a remote beach where they can frolic in luxury and seclusion. Joining them for the excursion is Charles (Rufus Sewell), his youth-obsessed wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee, “Lovecraft Country”), daughter Kara (Kylie Begley), and mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant), with Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird, “Avenue 5”) and her husband Jarin (Ken Leung) joining them a few minutes later. But shortly after the Capas and their shuttle bus companions arrive at the idyllic cove, they begin to notice a strange transformation, first in Maddox, Trent, and Kara, and then themselves: They are growing older, by years, in just a matter of minutes. Unable to exit the beach by the same path they entered because of a mysterious pressure that makes them black out before ejecting them back onto the sand, the group quickly grows frantic to find a solution, especially after a woman’s body washes up in the surf, and a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre, “The Underground Railroad”), who was there when they arrived, explains that she had accompanied him there the day before.
