Whatever your opinion on his work, it’s undeniable M. Night Shyamalan is a director who makes choices. All filmmaking, of course, requires conscious decisions, whether it’s writing, music selection, what to include in the frame, or what to leave out. Shyamalan’s choices are always noticeable by design. Whether they’re noticeable for the right reasons is the question.

Shyamalan’s latest, Old, is full of these kinds of choices, and they aren’t limited to the filmmaking. In addition to the deliberate decisions being made behind the camera, the ability to make a choice quickly and live with the consequences is one of the themes of the film. But as big as this movie goes, you’d be hard-pressed to call most of the choices Shyamalan makes here good ones. For every thought-provoking idea presented, there’s a creative execution behind it that leaves you asking “Why?”

Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are a couple with two young kids, 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and six-year-old Trent (Nolan River), headed to a vacation at a fancy tropical resort. The family and a group of fellow travelers head to a secluded beach for the day, but the trip turns terrifying when Trent discovers a woman’s dead body and a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre, and no, I’m not making up his character’s name) who claims he has no idea what happened to her.

The corpse becomes the least of everyone’s worries when the kids, and everyone else, start aging at an alarming rate. Maddox, Trent and their new playmate Kara go from children to teenagers, played by Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen respectively, in minutes. Wealthy surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell) displays advancing mental problems. His wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) experiences some wicked osteoporosis. Meanwhile, Guy, Prisca and the rest of the group try to determine a way off the beach and back to safety, with varying degrees of success.

Shyamalan pulls off a few neat tricks, including some snazzy camera angles and, yes, a patented third-act twist that puts some things into a clever new perspective. But all of his usual problems are here, too, including his bizarre penchant for unnaturally wooden dialogue, which here is The Happening-levels of awkward. His stacked cast does a better-than-average job of selling those lines, particularly Sewell, who’s so natural it’s like he’s wandered in from a totally different (better) film.

The other issue is a much stranger one. It’s not really a spoiler to say that the conceit of Old is rife with possibility for body horror, and there are several moments where the film gets conceptually gnarly. Yet in every Cronenbergian situation, Shyamalan always cuts away, or shoots the scene so we never see what’s happening, only the reactions to it. The result feels off-kilter and weirdly (not to mention needlessly) protective of the audience. You could make an argument for this decision, but there’s a much better case for not incorporating these moments, which include a nasty fall and an emergency surgery, at all, if Shyamalan is truly that averse to showing them. 

Old pulls itself out of a nosedive in its final act, which is so wackadoo that it makes you wonder if there’s a level of self-awareness to everything before it that requires reassessment. Determining whether that twist makes the movie secretly actually good or an unintentional campfest presents a head-spinning conundrum that takes up a lot of time. If Shyamalan’s film teaches us anything, it’s that time is something none of us have enough of, so if you’re not in the mood for that debate, yours is probably better spent elsewhere.

C+

“Old” is in theaters Friday.