Is Time Our Enemy? M. Night Shyamalan’s Old.
Recently having checked The Card Counter, I find parallels present between Schrader’s recent character study and Shyamalan’s high concept genre experiment. Not so much when examining the two as independent work, but rather in the role they play when viewed holistically as parts of an ongoing project, that being, the two directors’ careers.
Namely, both pictures supervene acclaimed reinventions representing not a return; but an actualization of interests. One that carries a renovated visual grammar informed by former characteristic traits. Not that it’s in vain to trace them to prior stages in their odysseys through film creation, as their personalities have and will prevail strong.
However, it is undeniable that both are participating in what constitutes the attributes of a fully developed late style. Narrowing the analysis and leaving the comparison: As much as the tone and social dynamics relating to the thread recall The Happening’s excursion in unintelligible terror; the close-ups, spatial containment, natural lighting, and showcase of control over replicating subjectivity while reveling on artificiality all continue territory explored in Glass and Split.
Making all the more exciting to see the disdained creative head behind The Village and Signs exert this new articulation of his usual obsessions into something not relying on continuity. With Glass, Shyamalan promised new horizons when closing one of his most recognizable stories, and Old delivers with all its enthusiastic employment of genre traditions.
Preponderating in this late style has been the cited interest in the containment of the principal action for the sake of dramatic engagement, unveiling in a limited location to expand the premise’s possibilities with no loss of sight. The subtraction extends to a more self-evident proposition, now evoking further than in the 2008 paranoia chaos of The Happening horror as a rhetorical scenario from films like The Thing or The Night of the Living Dead. It doesn’t prove to be a coincidence the relationship between the patriarch and medic with the sole black man on the beach:
Old is, before its twist, a horror of social dynamics and speculative sociological scenarios as a genre exercise, groups responding both with reason and lack thereof to an unrelenting menace causing them to be too impotent to overcome; With the addition, like in The Happening, of that danger’s invisibility coercing dependency and confrontation amongst those present. Tensions between individuals driven from anxieties originating in material identities unleashing consequences furthering the advancement of the action. Stereotypes as figurants, if the naming of Gael Garcia Bernal as Guy didn’t reveal enough, in the function of chamber dramatics of dispute and trust begetting human acts of generosity and peripherical devastation alike.
However, not to ignore in the arranging of this speculative scenario is formed a dialectical exchange enacted towards Glass, demonstrating consciousness over the image as an action. Fundamental, like never before other than in Lady in the Water, is Shyamalan’s performative participation. Him being the agent guiding the victims to their trap, proceeding to film it. These last two additions to his oeuvre; both qualify as meta-text on their conception contextualized in the structure that traverses them. And the role of the auteur caught in the hermetic tribulations of the machine.
In the former, the auteur partakes in the machinations to suffer and, from his pain, engenders emancipation, a revolutionary call for recognition. Here, rather than revolt, he is complicit in the political violence through his creative gaze, commodifying psychological and physical affliction for the consumption of the industry heads ceding him the means to propound the experiment.
It is a return to the questions of cinematic ethics brought in The Visit, querying if there’s exploitation ingrained in the concepts and forms proposed; if there can be a moral cinema when the gaze presupposes exertion of its power to the subjects. Look no further than in the disposition of the camera for further affirmation. Always with an autonomy of its own, beyond being chained to the mere description of the actions.
It moves freely, seeking compositions and inventive angles, expressing liberty unreachable to the characters, establishing an asymmetrical relationship between observer and observed. All the interrogations are made all the more fascinating by how he’s unable to conciliate his reflections on cinema as abuse with his indulgence with the horror antics and creative possibilities, permeating the tragedies with panic, sure, but also a twisted sense of fun in their configuration.
What all the pieces culminate in is exhibiting Old as an extended exercise on dissociation. The passage of time as a series of abrupt, mortifying realizations of its inevitability; Literalizing the struggle through the grammar of genre fiction. Your daughter was six yesterday; now she is sixteen and tomorrow sixty, and you might not be to see that growth. All experiences accumulated and missed in our inability to realize all we’d wish with our limited time. You no longer recognize yourself with those you love or neither with your own body; it is all alien, a multitude of identities you can’t grasp nor apprehend because it fleets from your fingertips like sand in the wind.
But in a parallel line, the industrial impelling an accelerated temporality to the individual that they can’t keep up with, alluding to the present condition of control through excessive stimulus; time as personal but also a political fabrication. There’s an impossibility in dueling mortality; one has to go through all the stages of life, never prepared or equipped to deal with all the baggage they bear. When the Grim Reaper makes his act of presence, the best is to enjoy your last breath and appreciate the moment of quiet finality. However, a corporative definition of time, killing the past and leaving no room for the future, is a battle to face because it is not metaphysical; it is political.
Old; 2021; M. Night Shyamalan; Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Eliza Scanlen, Rufus Sewell.
