In the Flesh: Old (Patreon)

Twelve people mill and separate and mill again on a sun-washed sweep of sand flanked by soaring cliffs on three sides and on the fourth the ceaseless pounding of the surf. Their bodies are minuscule against these natural backdrops, and director M. Night Shyamalan often positions them at extreme distances from the camera with intervening objects to complicate the framing and give a sense of scale and space. This choice of visual language imparts a sense of powerlessness and insignificance, placing the film’s characters on a clear symbolic continuum with the flotsam washed up on the beach and swept out to sea over the course of the film. All the chaos of their attempts to understand the bizarre phenomenon unfolding around them, all the fury and conflict as they come to realize the impossibility of escape, is ultimately of no consequence. “Why were we trying to escape this beach?” asks an aged Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) as night deepens around him. “I don’t remember.”

At times Shyamalan’s camera feels like a thirteenth member of the beach’s mismatched fellowship, spiraling through and around their fractious groups, hurtling shakily but with deep clarity of vision along the strand behind running children. It is the director’s most beautiful and visually engrossing film by a considerable margin, and if the island setting is doing some heavy lifting to get it there, Shyamalan’s knack for parsing large groups of people to control pacing and tension is equally crucial. His frequent visual references to Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock are deft and haunting, expanding on that film’s sense of placelessness and its preoccupation with the flow of time and incorporating the ocean’s enigmatic vastness into its symbolic system. Until its clumsily tidy final twenty minutes, the entire film is a constant ebbing away of life punctuated by the tidal breaks of random traumatic occurrences.

Old is rich with potential interpretations for its chilling and cleverly executed premise. Its cavalcade of shocking disasters, one piling on atop another until the individual horror is subsumed into a greater sense of overwhelmed malaise, can be read as a clear metaphor for our modern experience internalizing an endless succession of societal traumas. The simultaneous prolonging and foreshortening of the younger characters’ childhood as the phenomenon of the beach leaves them mentally childlike even as their bodies race toward the finish line, maps neatly onto the millennial and gen Z condition as we come to terms with dwindling resources and hostile economic conditions. Our future has been mortgaged on terms we’ve never had the time or frame of reference to understand, and even as we stand blinking in the sunlight it’s eroding out from under our feet. Old is beautiful, thought-provoking, and, in spite of its flaws, perhaps Shyamalan’s most interesting film.