Since The Happening, M. Night Shyamalan has only directed one good ol’ fashioned horror movie, The Visit. He’s otherwise been preoccupied with building an unlikely cinematic universe (Split and Glass), working with Will and Jaden Smith (After Earth), and making the big-screen adaptation of an all-time great TV show that I won’t mention because I’m still angry about how bad it was. But with his new film, Old, Shyamalan is back to doing what he does best: creeping me the heck out. (This is a compliment.)
Based on a French graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old follows “a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly… reducing their entire lives into a single day,” according to the official plot summary. The trailer above has mysteriously-aging kids, lost items buried in the sand, dead bodies, spiders, mysterious coded messages, and best of all, no one drowning in a puddle.
Old, which stars Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Eliza Scanlen, Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Embeth Davidtz, Emun Elliott, and Kathleen Chalfant, opens on July 23.