by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent

Freakish filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan has been cooking up some summer BBQ ideas during the lockdown, or so it seems with his new release OLD from Universal Pictures. As with all of his movies, you will see the inevitable stunned cluster of people staring into the camera wondering what the heck is happening.

Not your average beach day.

OLD is no exception, and this won’t be out in theaters until July 23, but the plot has a nifty horror trick. Namely the main characters oxidize into (as the title says) old people in just the wink of an eye. 

You’ll have to see it for the rest of the pivot points in this should-be relaxing beach narrative gone awry. Or as Universal puts it, Shyamalan “unveils a chilling, mysterious new thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.”

Escape turns out to be useless, naturally.

Amazing that isn’t the entire picture right there, but, as with everything M. Night Shyamalan, there is another dimension of plot structure lurking beneath the sandy shores of his imagination.

Get OLD just seeing this trailer…

Anyway, looks like a Summer winner for families out of the lockdown huddle and into the cinema.

OLD is a Blinding Edge Pictures production, directed and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. The movie is from his screenplay based on the graphic novel “Sandcastle” by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. The film is also produced by Ashwin Rajan (Glass, AppleTV+’s Servant) and Marc Bienstock (Glass, Split). The film’s executive producer is Steven Schneider.

Golden Globe winner Gael García Bernal (Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle) stars in OLD along with Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread), Rufus Sewell (Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle), Ken Leung (Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens), Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending), Abbey Lee (HBO’s Lovecraft Country), Aaron Pierre (Syfy’s Krypton), Alex Wolff (Hereditary), Embeth Davidtz (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Eliza Scanlen (Little Women), Emun Elliott (Star Wars: Episode VII—The Force Awakens), Kathleen Chalfant (Showtime’s The Affair) and Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit). 

July 23 is the Universal official release date, but wasn’t it fun to age in 20 seconds just with the preview?

Visit here for a quick look at OLD.

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