(There’s also something up with Prisca’s health that they haven’t told the children.) The emotional shadows are dispelled when the manager offers the family a day trip to a secluded, secret beach-a place that he claims few guests get to see. Prisca and Guy seem obliviously delighted with the luxury, but they’re also distracted by their troubles: the vacation is something of a last hurrah, because they’re on the verge of splitting up. His name is Idlib (Kailen Jude), and he’s the manager’s lonely nephew, whose furtive solitude is also an evident warning sign. Trent, a quirkily earnest and precocious kid who’s in the habit of asking adults their names and “occupations,” quickly befriends another boy in the lobby. The attention is too great, the welcome suspiciously wrong-it’s obvious to viewers, if not to the Capas, that something is amiss. At the gleaming hotel, the family is met by an obsequious manager (Gustaf Hammarsten), who, backed by a line of smiling staffers, plies the parents with cocktails from a prompt server named Madrid (Francesca Eastwood). ![]() (Filming was done in the Dominican Republic.) There, the Capa family-a near-middle-aged couple, Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and Guy (Gael García Bernal), their eleven-year-old daughter, Maddox (Alexa Swinton), and their six-year-old son, Trent (Nolan River)-arrives for a vacation in a state of emotional stress and stifled conflict that’s already on view in a van ride on a road lined with palm trees. The movie, based on the graphic novel “ Sandcastle,” by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, is centered on a tropical beach resort in an unnamed country. With “Old,” facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic-on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it-Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity. His frequent artistic pitfall is complication-the burdening of stories with extravagant yet undeveloped byways in order to endow them with ostensible significance and to stoke exaggerated effects. M. Night Shyamalan’s new film, “Old” (which opens in theatres on Friday), is different. Science-fiction films, once a cinematic counterpart to pulp fiction, are today often big-budget, overproduced spectacles that substitute grandiosity for imagination. ![]() Just as it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken, it takes a smart filmmaker to make a stupid movie, which I mean in the best possible way.
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