Like a mushroom – one of the appetizing yet poisonous species, perhaps – M Night Shyamalan thrives in dark, contained spaces. His latest film Old isn’t physically enclosed, the majority taking place on an idyllic tropical inlet with gorgeous vistas of sand, sky and surf, though its visitors will soon learn that this beckoning setting wants to kill them and isn’t so easily escaped. But narratively speaking, it’s a tighter and more focused movie than we’ve seen from the film-maker in some time, and not so coincidentally, it finds him in top form. Planting nearly a dozen characters in a fixed locale, plunging them into terror, and letting the tension mount plays to the strengths of an unpredictable artist who shines under minimal, Twilight Zone-style parameters. The corollary to this notion reveals the fatal flaw that’s dealt his reputation and career so many ups and downs over nearly 30 years of film-making: a tragic excess of ambition.
Shyamalan comes to Old hot on the heels of Split and Glass, the concluding two-thirds of a mini-franchise that cast him in the not-historically-comfortable role of blockbuster steward. Forming a trilogy with 2000’s Unbreakable, the films tackled the superhero genre from an idiosyncratic slant identifying it as an M Night production. His script dispensed with derring-do to focus on the no-win tensions between a paraplegic megalomaniac, a mutant suffering from dissociative identity disorder that causes him to shapeshift, and a godlike defender who gets drowned to death in a small puddle. The deftest writerly choice concerned the sense of scope, limited to an isolated act of destruction in Shyamalan’s beloved home of Philadelphia rather than some universe-incinerating judgment day. The reviews and gargantuan box-office returns vindicated his decision, and proved that he’d learned from his false steps earlier in the decade.
To work backwards, 2015’s The Visit (another one of his inventive closed-door projects that ended up minting money from a modest budget) had to provide a “comeback” juncture for his career narrative before he would be ready to return to the mythos first laid out by Unbreakable. Before that back-to-basics success – kids go to visit grandma and grandpa, except they’ve been seemingly seized by homicidal impulses – Shyamalan’s profile had taken a nosedive following a pair of costly failures in the industry’s uppermost echelons. As is the case with so many of us, albeit in a different sense, the man was just not good with money.
The Razzie-festooned, rightly reviled one-two punch of The Last Airbender and After Earth represent a clear valley in the Shyamalan filmography. Two planetary epics that each afforded over $100m to burn, these would-be tentpoles demanded a massive, CGI-driven style with no place in the director’s wheelhouse, resulting in impersonal, unattractive spectacles that only accentuated his achilles’ heel for crafting dialogue. In the latter film, Will Smith played a spaceman named Cypher Raige; this sort of affable dumbness plays better in the permissive and less self-serious realm of horror and suspense, where stupidity fuels the danger we’ve paid to see. In Old, when a mother (Vicky Krieps) explains that she’s qualified to analyze a skeleton because she just so happens to be a museum curator and then explains what that is, we’re along for the ride. It’s no stranger than – spoiler alert – a beach that ages you a year every half-hour. We’re in another place, what Rod Serling called a dimension not just of sight and sound, but of mind.
Shyamalan’s most lucrative, well-received films teeter on the line between the workably absurd and just plain ridiculous. His understanding of human speech has a stilted functionality to it, a camp-adjacent non-reality that can also be traced back to Serling’s era. The Sixth Sense, Signs, The Village, Lady in the Water and The Happening all hinge on a generous suspension of disbelief, not just in terms of plot but in behavior (Lady in the Water, a pricy film shying away from his roots in horror to pursue scattershot fantasy for disappointing returns, foreshadowed the issues awaiting him). Bruce Willis may seem slightly off, but you would be too, if you were [redacted for the sake of those readers who have been under a rock since 1999]. Treating the odder strokes with total earnestness strengthens the work on the whole, as illustrated by the savvy measurements of Old. In it, Shyamalan drops in the grisliest set piece of his life, mangling a woman’s body beyond recognition until her skeleton resembles the Windows 95 pipes screensaver. The grotesquerie registers because the onlooking characters are as amenable to the over-the-top implausibility as we are.
Through this long and winding path, the one constant has been the studios’ unwavering faith in the boy wonder who magicked over $600m out of thin air before he’d hit age 30. In the confidence that he’s always this close to another dizzying windfall of profit, the industry higher-ups have designated him as one of the few film-makers with license to make original-concept movies sold on his name alone. Love him or hate him, this makes Shyamalan a valuable commodity in a Hollywood increasingly apprehensive about creative empowerment. He’s made himself essential as the only person who knows how to do what he does, a name brand for which fans will accept no substitutes. Even if he’s on the skids, all he has to do to get back in the public’s good graces is be himself.
