I saw Old...

M. Night Shyamalan's Old is like other productions by the writer/director: Twilight Zone-ish. That means it's experimental, outside the mainstream.  

The story (based on a novel by Pierre Oscar-Levy and Frederick Peeters) deals with the Cappa family (Gael Garcia Bernal as the dad, Vicky Krieps as the mom, Thomasin McKenzie/Embeth Daviditz as the sister and Alex Wolf/Emun Elliott as the brother) on an island holiday, immersed in the beach's alluring minerals. It's all nice and simple at first, but circumstances soon go awry, with the advent of a young woman's corpse. As the clan (and other vacationers) ponder her cause of death, they grow older in a stark, visible way, to the point where it becomes clear they'll perish within a day. 

As one might infer, Old is a symbolic/compact journey in the James Joyce's Ulysses vein, but served as a weird, thought-provoking Shyamalan/Zone parable: profound but frightful in its mysterious ramifications.  

Seizing all that life can offer when there's so little time to live is the movie's motif. This thought-provoking angle even references Star Trek's "the Deadly Years": One hopes to reverse the accelerating disease, but all one can do is see it through. As in real life, one does one's best to rationalize the ongoing damage, even though it's impossible to avert the outcome. (BTW: An explanation as to why the folks age so rapidly does surface, more or less, and yes, it does graze upon pandemic paranoia. Perfect timing, eh?) 

There are times, however, when the tale adapts a meandering stream (if only to throw one off), rather like Shyamalan's Lady in the Water, but as with the latter, Old's performers keep the offbeat atmosphere in check, drawing the necessary empathy to make the surprises crisp and memorable. (Supporting cast members Aaron Pierre, Rufus Sewell, Kathleen Chalfant, Abbey Lee {who incidentally looks amazing in a bikini}, Eliza Scanlan, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Gustaf Hammarston {an ersatz Mr. Rourke}are also convincing throughout the fretful venture.) With this said, Old does, indeed, mirror the stories of Rod Serling and company, in which fanciful fiction becomes credible because the characters are worthy of identification. 

There are many decent imagi-movies now in circulation, but most abide by established formulas: stuff we know like the back of our hands. Old isn't original on all counts, but still impressive for the way it manipulates its variables. That's not an easy task to achieve, and Shyamalan deserves credit for attempting what most are too timid (or limited) to essay.