OLD
BEACH BODIES
WELCOME TO THE ULTIMATE TOURIST TRAP… M NIGHT SHYAMALAN CONFRONTS MORTALITY IN OLD
WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD
WATER IS RARELY ALL that it seems in the universe of M Night Shyamalan. In Unbreakable it’s liquid Kryptonite to Bruce Willis’s blue-collar Superman. In Signs tumblers of the stuff prove an unlikely defence against cosmic invaders. Now, in existential suspenser Old, it surrounds an uncanny beach where time itself is lethally accelerated and corpses bob on the tide.
So when SFX chats with Shyamalan via Zoom we keep our own tumbler of tap water discreetly out of view. Even a crafty swig feels potentially loaded with symbolism.
Old is an adaptation of Sandcastle, a haunting 2010 graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. Shyamalan received the book as a Father’s Days gift and optioned it soon after. The idea of mortality on fast-forward chimed with some recent anxiety on his part.
“It’s something I’ve become more cognizant of in the last five years,” he shares, “watching my parents be in their eighties. Physically and mentally they’re not in the place that they were, even just a few years ago. Taking care of them, it’s like the roles have flipped. The care taker has now become the child. The profundity of that cycle of life, how literal it is…
“And then seeing my children – you blink and you turn around and they’re older. We talk about what life would be like in a few years and it just blows your mind, because that one will be driving and that one will be out of college and that one will be having children and on and on… It keeps on moving. And it never stops. Seeing these two aspects happening made me think a lot about this subject, this relationship to time. And then when this graphic novel came to me it was a twisted, Twilight Zone-y, Black Mirror-y kind of version of time. And I thought, ‘This is exactly what I’m feeling right now’.”