BEACH BODIES

WATER IS RARELY ALL that it seems in the universe of M Night Shyamalan. In Unbreakable it’s liquid Kryptonite to Bruce Willis’s blue-collar Superman. In Signs tumblers of the stuff prove an unlikely defence against cosmic invaders. Now, in existential suspenser Old, it surrounds an uncanny beach where time itself is lethally accelerated and corpses bob on the tide.

So when SFX chats with Shyamalan via Zoom we keep our own tumbler of tap water discreetly out of view. Even a crafty swig feels potentially loaded with symbolism.

Old is an adaptation of Sandcastle, a haunting 2010 graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. Shyamalan received the book as a Father’s Days gift and optioned it soon after. The idea of mortality on fast-forward chimed with some recent anxiety on his part.

“It’s something I’ve become more cognizant of in the last five years,” he shares, “watching my parents be in their eighties. Physically and mentally they’re not in the place that they were,