Old: time is relative

Shyamalan is a filmmaker who often sparks controversy: you love him or you hate him. Overrated for some, visionary for others; The truth is that he does not leave anyone indifferent. Old It is one of his feature films in the key of thriller fantastic that, once again, has divided audiences and critics.

Old takes us to a paradisiacal enclave where several families are preparing to spend a pleasant vacation. After arriving at the hotel, a group of characters will be taken to a secret and privileged beach that will end up becoming a natural prison, a prison in which time goes faster than normal.

Soon, the characters will realize that something more unites them than having chosen the same vacation destination, and that is that they all suffer from some illness. Time speeds up and the consequences of your pathologies will become increasingly evident..

Without being able to escape, The characters will try to survive and find a way out of the prison of old age.knowing that in a matter of minutes their lives could come to an end.

The film has been released in Spain with the title Timewhile in Latin America a more literal translation has been chosen: Old. Therefore, in order to avoid confusion, I address the film using its original English title: Old.

The camera, the great protagonist

Perhaps Shyamalan’s big mistake was making himself known to the general public with a film as applauded as The sixth Sense (1999). He set the bar so high that it seems that all of his subsequent works will live in the shadow of a big tree. Somehow, despite his success, it seems that he dug his own grave and nothing can surpass the film starring Bruce Willis and a little Haley Joel Osment who “sometimes saw dead people.”

If there’s one thing we can’t argue with Shyamalan, it’s his great skill as a storyteller. Many may find it disconcerting or even a somewhat narcissistic exercise.

In Oldhighlights the filmmaker’s ability to show and hide fundamental information at will. Old It will become an exercise in imagining, in seeing beyond the limits of the field. And there is nothing more terrifying than our own imagination.

Despite being in an idyllic, open-air environment, Shyamalan insists on showing us claustrophobic scenes and does so by suffocating the characters, cornering them with his camera in very uncomfortable broken close-ups.

Although he guides our gaze intelligently, it is true that sometimes he forgets to take advantage of his actors a little more and relies too much on a camera in a desire for prominence.

In a time when terror wants to teach, show viscera and blood, Old It anticipates the gore moment, but moves away from it so that it is the viewer’s imagination that reconstructs what happens offscreen.

With elegance, the camera moves through the characters, changing the point of view, playing with us and constantly deceiving us, in the same way that the characters have been tricked into a beautiful death trap. We have the feeling that someone is watching from above, but we never see beyond of the rocks that enclose the beach.

Nature suddenly becomes tremendously hostile. The rocks seem to be magnetized and prevent the characters from turning back; The sea seems to be the only way out, announcing itself at the same time as a death trap.

From the fantastic to the rational

Old It moves on a real and known plane, however, it will seem strange to us. The characters belong to the same world as the viewer and know the natural laws, but upon crossing the threshold they enter a strange world in which these laws seem to work differently and their aging is accelerated by leaps and bounds.

Death, illness and despair trap them on a beach that could very well be an island, a prison.

How to show this altered nature? Shyamalan uses several cinematographic tricks to use a familiar environment and make it unusual and sinister.. Nothing is coincidence in Oldnor the sound, nor the shots nor the camera movements.

This hostile nature is palpable from the first steps of the characters among the rocks, reminding us of the exploits of the first travel books that described magical worlds full of mermaids and extraordinary beings, but also of films like Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975), in which the magical never makes an appearance and it is nature itself and the off-screen that are responsible for enveloping us in a mystical and terrifying atmosphere.

Likewise, this natural prison invites us to think about caged animals. At all times, the characters feel observed from above, a sensation that the camera is responsible for accentuating. Even the welcome at the hotel is somewhat unusual and too idyllic to be true, the viewer at all times suspects that something strange is happening in that place.

Shyamalan’s devotion to Hitchcock and Steven Spielberg is more than evident. He is inspired by the first when it comes to dosing the suspense and it will not be difficult for us to find scenes that evoke the artificial paradise – at the same time dangerous – of Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993) or the summer and everyday terror of Shark (Spielberg, 1975).

This hostile nature, in reality, hides a much more interesting debate and that is that the passage of time on the beach is not just a matter of chance.. The viewer, at all times, is aware that the characters have been brought there deliberately and with a purpose.

Shyamalan hides from us the true intentions of the tourist complex, but he has left us some clues throughout the film – sometimes with too much explanation – that lead us to ask questions of ethical and scientific debate similar to those we saw in the saga. Jurassic Park.

Old: take advantage of every moment

If there is a latent message in Old It is none other than taking advantage of the moment. Life is short and ephemeral and if something is true from the moment we are born, it is that, at some point, we are going to die.

Shyamalan uses mystery and the fantastic to make us aware of something as simple as the brevity of our lives and, therefore, there is no point in discussing or not facing the conflicts that arise daily.

If there is a connecting link in all his cinema, it is that all his films end up delving into the problems derived from lack of communicationwhether in a couple, between friends or even the non-acceptance and verbalization of the trauma.

The fear of death is universal: we know that our time on earth is momentary and at some point we will cease to exist. The protagonist family – and actually all the characters – present internal conflicts linked to the fact that they do not give space to the problem in their dialogues.

We see a couple who have not told their children that their mother is sick; to a man who, despite being aware of his wife’s infidelity, refuses to talk about it; to a woman totally obsessed with his physical appearance, etc.

In short, an extreme x-ray of many contemporary societies. A series of characters who, faced with terror, will end up verbalizing their concerns and desires and, somehow, in the beach prison, they will end up freeing themselves from their ghosts and nightmares.

If there is one thing we can blame the filmmaker for, apart from not fully squeezing his actors, it is a certain implausibility – no one is going to believe the notebook. But we are in a fantastic universe and the majority of viewers are not going to suffer too much from this license.

Although perhaps having more room for interpretation, without so much explanation, would have been a success; However, Shyamalan himself is responsible for reminding us that this is his film, that he is present at all times and looks at us through his lens, imitating, as usual, his Hitchcock reference.

Time is relative and it doesn’t matter how fast or slow it passes. It doesn’t matter if life lasts 100 years or 2 days, the important thing is not to leave loose ends and overcome obstacles that block or impoverish communication. An exercise in bravery that we have seen time and time again in Shyamalan’s films from very different perspectives.

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