M. night shyamalan

The thing about a new M. Night Shyamalan movie is that, going in, one never knows whether it’ll be “one of the good ones.” Few directors have quite as uneven a track record: in the wake of the much-loved The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village, Shyamalan helmed a string of disasters, culminating in the big-budget catastrophe that was 2013’s After Earth. On the other hand, 2016’s Split and 2019’s Glass were both great. Knock at the Cabin falls somewhere in the middle. The film centers on a gay couple, Andrew and Eric (Ben Aldridge and Jonathan Groff, respectively), and their adopted daughter Wen (Kristen Cui), who are forced to confront a nightmare scenario. Holed up in a lonely cabin in the forest, they are accosted by a quartet of heavily armed outsiders.

Like most of the world, I saw M. Night Shyamalan’s very fine ghost story The Sixth Sense when it came out in 1999. It’s a blessing that it was released in pre-social media days, because its central twist would have been spoiled in minutes. Yet even without the shock value occasioned by its splashy central revelation, the film is still a haunting (no pun intended) piece of work, a Kubrickian exercise in restraint where the horrors are genuinely terrifying on the few occasions that the movie moves out of its comfort zone of chilly reflection. The then-twenty-nine-year-old director clearly had a glittering career ahead of him. I looked forward to his next film eagerly. Two and a half decades on, I would happily cross the country to avoid seeing another film by Shyamalan.

The biggest challenge in reviewing M. Night Shyamalan’s Old lies in describing its central idea without making the film sound considerably cleverer and more interesting than it is, but I’ll give it my best shot. Just remember: if I fail, and Old does sound clever or interesting at any point, it totally isn’t. This is directed and written by Shyamalan who is one of the most consistently inconsistent of film makers (Sixth Sense, good; The Village, so-so; Last Airbender, let’s never talk of it again). The central idea has it that a group of holidaymakers are trapped on a tropical, secluded beach where ageing is accelerated and, as they discover, every 30 minutes there amounts to a year.