Old was 2021's horror offering from the twistmeister himself, M. Night Shyamalan, only it's not really a twist - the central conceit revolves simply around something that happens to a gaggle of holidaymakers.
A disparate group of vacationers on an island break are directed to a secluded beach by the hotel staff, hidden beyond a cliff line of strange rocks.
Only once there, strange - and often gruesome - things start to happen.
Quite quickly they deduce that there is something about the beach - probably the rock formations - that is distorting time, so that they all age about a year for every half-hour they spend on the beach.
Unfortunately, it's seemingly impossible to leave as well, as trying to pass beyond the influence of the mysterious rocks is like a diver suffering the bends, on land this means splitting headaches and staggering back onto the beach, at sea - trying to swim out against the current - this is much more fatal.
Although cuts, and other such wounds, heal themselves rapidly the adults eventually develop physical infirmities associated with old age.
But for the children the change is much more dramatic as their bodies grow and develop, while their mental age remains as it was.
Let's be honest, as if often the case with a Shyamalan horror film, the set-up for Old is genuinely intriguing, but at 100 minutes (plus almost 10 minutes of credits) you can't help feeling this would have worked way better as an hour-long episode of the Twilight Zone.
Written and directed by Shyamalan, based upon a graphic novel (Sandcastle) by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, the story gets to the meat of the action quite quickly, but because there are so many players on the beach it feels like it takes unnecessarily long to work through everyone's story arc.
Shyamalan also takes the odd decision, given that this is a 15-certificate horror movie, to not show several grim incidents that happen in the first half of the movie, instead relying entirely on the reaction of the other characters.
Therefore, for instance, we get the bizarre sequence where someone declares "the dog is dying" (one of the people brought their pet dog to the beach), people 'ooh' and 'urrgh', but we never see what it is they're looking at or how the area's special qualities actually affect the dog... nor is it ever seen (or mentioned) again.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see a dog suffering from rapid onset ageing, but if you're going to write it out of the story so drastically, why bring it in in the first place?
If there is a message in Old, it's about not wasting your allotted time on Earth, carpe diem and all that.
There is a neat wrap-up to the narrative, and a major sci-fi infodump explaining what's going on and why, but the ultimate resolution feels a bit clumsy. While by no means a 'happy' ending, again it's a decision that doesn't gel totally with the body horror vibe that Old gives off.
A darker, more shocking end might have given the story weight, with the horrific suggestion that it could still happen to others in the future.
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