Every time we get a new M. Night Shyamalan movie, we wonder which version of the filmmaker we’re going to get. Is it the boundlessly creative and inventive mind behind The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Glass? Or the self-indulgent and unrelentingly dull creator of Lady in the Water, The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth?
Well, the early reactions to his new thriller Old are starting to roll in, and the good news is that it looks like we could be in store for some vintage Shyamalan, packed with twists and turns. In fact, some are even calling it his best movie since Unbreakable, which hit theaters no less than 20 years ago.
Inspired by graphic novel Sandcastle, Old follows a band of disparate character trapped on a beach, where they encounter an unexplained phenomenon that causes them to age rapidly every 30 minutes. With nowhere to go and time running out, they face a race against time to figure out what’s going on, and how they could possibly hope to stop it. It’s one hell of a hook to say the least, and you can check out some of the early responses below.
Old hits theaters this coming Friday, but there doesn’t seem to have been a huge amount of promotional weight behind it. The box office is slowly but surely regaining some sort of consistency, and while his reputation has taken a few hits over the years, the commercial success of Split and Glass has shown that there’s still value in the M. Night Shyamalan brand.
Early reactions are always of the positive variety, though, but there’s plenty of reasons to be quietly confident about Old marking another return to form for the writer and director.