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    ‘Knock at the Cabin’ Review: Who’s There? The Apocalypse.

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    In M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thought experiment, Dave Bautista brings the end of the world to a peaceful country cottage.A little girl, out collecting grasshoppers in the forest, meets someone who might be described — if this were a picture book — as a friendly giant. His huge arms are covered in tattoos, and his demeanor walks a fine line between gentle and fearsome.His name is Leonard, and his new acquaintance, just about to turn 8, is called Wen. Since this is a movie by M. Night Shyamalan — and a pretty good one, all things considered — a sinister vibe creeps in around the edges of their first encounter. The colors are uncannily bright, the close-up shots unnervingly angled (Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer are responsible for the 35-millimeter cinematography). The music (by Herdis Stefansdottir) hums with menace. Something scary is about to happen.What happens is a version of what former philosophy students and debate-happy internet smarties will recognize as the Trolley Problem, a chestnut of hypothetical ethical disputation. Would you, the classic version goes, run over one person with a trolley if doing so meant you could save five people on the other track? The variation that Leonard (Dave Bautista) proposes to Wen (Kristen Cui) and her family is at once grander and more intimate. Would you sacrifice yourself or someone you loved to prevent a global apocalypse?Think fast! But don’t, maybe, think too hard about the premise and the narrative scaffolding of this itchy, claustrophobic, metaphysical thriller, which Shyamalan adapted (with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) from a novel by Paul Tremblay. Leonard is accompanied by three other believers in his end-times scenario: Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn) and Redmond (Rupert Grint). Strangers until very recently, they received identical visions of flood, plague and darkness. They believe this cascade of catastrophes will come to pass unless Wen or one of her dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), volunteers to die.Why them? Is it because Eric and Andrew are a gay couple, or because they happen to have rented an unlucky vacation property? Surely not the first thing: Sabrina insists on behalf of the group that “we don’t have a homophobic bone in our bodies.” Even if that doesn’t turn out to be true (Redmond has some ugliness in his back story), the real estate seems like a more plausible explanation. The movie is called “Knock at the Cabin” (the book is called “The Cabin at the End of the World”), and the house, with its remote location, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, dark wood paneling and deep cellar, looks like a perfect place to host a horror movie.Is “Knock at the Cabin” one of those? That’s another topic for debate. Shyamalan is sometimes classified as a horror auteur, but the genre label doesn’t always fit with his themes and methods. While this movie is suspenseful and (discreetly) bloody, it is more interested in thoughts and tender sentiments than in fright or shock.The story isn’t coiled around a clever, rug-pulling twist — a sometimes tiresome, sometimes bracing Shyamalan signature — so much as balanced on a series of simple binaries. Either Leonard and his pals are telling the truth or they’re out of their minds. Andrew and Eric will believe them or not. The film’s effectiveness depends on what occurs on the way to the answers, and in this respect Shyamalan’s wit and sincerity serve him and the audience well.Granting the preposterousness of the whole idea, he is genuinely nonetheless curious about what it would be like to have this kind of experience. Whether Leonard is the kindly schoolteacher and reluctant prophet he claims to be or the leader of a small and lethal doomsday cult, he tries to be sensitive to the predicament of his captives. The rules of the vision forbid him or his colleagues from performing the sacrifice themselves, so they engage Eric and Andrew in a lengthy, sometimes brutal seminar, with occasional news broadcasts to emphasize their argument.A handful of flashbacks of Andrew and Eric’s life as a couple — including their adoption of Wen — makes them seem like more than panicked, generic victims, while also opening up the occasionally stagy action. Aldridge and Groff do what they can to overcome the blandness of the characters, but the movie really belongs to Bautista and Cui, who provide the danger, charm, wit and grit that it needs to be even remotely credible.I wish it were more than that. There is a grandiosity here that’s hard to swallow, and a final swell of emotion that isn’t quite earned. For all its skill and cunning, “Knock at the Cabin” is an overwrought quasi-theological melodrama that also manages to be a half-baked thought experiment. It’s a thrill ride in a toy trolley.Knock at the CabinRated R. You see dead people. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      The Joy (and Pain) of the Physical, at an In-Person Berlin Film Festival

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      Coronavirus measures brought hassles. But the movies brought a means to escape them.BERLIN — What is your strategy during a nasal-swab antigen test? Personally, I look up and to the right as the technician inserts the little wand, either affecting an air of nonchalance or pretending I’ve been struck by a highly original thought. I know others make idle chitchat, and at least one fellow critic has taken to staring deeply into the tester’s eyes. It’s a pandemic: You get your kicks where you can.At the Berlin International Film Festival — which announced its prizewinners on Wednesday but is continuing public screenings through Feb. 20 — attending members of the press have had ample opportunity to hone their swab technique. Mandatory tests every 24 hours — even for the boosted — were part of a package of restrictions that the organizers of the festival, which is known as the Berlinale, agreed to so it could take place as a physical event.There were complaints. But every time someone whinged about the new ticket booking system or became exasperated by the Escher-inspired exit routes, which always seemed to involve multiple uphill flights of stairs, I found myself thinking: “Deal with it.” Or sometimes, less charitably: “Suck it up.”The category error from complainants is to compare this reduced-attendance edition with Before Times Berlinales. The real comparison is with last year’s online version, which debuted a stronger selection of films but didn’t feel like a festival at all. Consider that lonely experience as the alternative and the staircases, seating hassles and swabbing become a small price to pay.Ariane Labed in “Flux Gourmet.”Bankside FilmsAnd however deep your tester probes, it could hardly be as invasive as the public colonoscopy undergone in Peter Strickland’s willfully outré “Flux Gourmet,” one of the event’s buzzy early titles. Surely the most single-minded evocation of the discomfort of suppressing flatulence ever to get a major festival berth, Strickland’s film was only rivaled by François Ozon’s festival opener “Peter von Kant” for fun, gaudy aesthetics adorning an oddly disposable story. Ozon’s film quite amusingly pulls off its trick of overlaying details from Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s biography onto a gender-flipped reworking of Fassbinder’s 1972 classic “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant,” without ever actually justifying why.The single-location “Peter von Kant” is one of several Berlinale films that bears the hallmarks of shooting under pandemic conditions. “Fire,” which brought Claire Denis (incredibly) her first best director award at a major film festival, is another. Here, Juliette Binoche plays a woman torn between two lovers (or between “Both Sides of the Blade,” as the film’s more evocative international title puts it). If it falls short of Denis’s highest watermarks, it is at least notable for how it acknowledges the pandemic without making it the subject of the film.Quentin Dupieux’s highly enjoyable “Incredible But True” takes an oblique approach, not referencing coronavirus restrictions directly but creating unmissable parallels in what is essentially a time-travel movie. Witty and unassumingly profound, it’s a marked contrast to Bertrand Bonello’s chaotically indulgent “Coma,” which involves lockdown navel-gazing of a borderline incomprehensible nature. It received a wildly divided reception, represented by the guy beside me leaving in a huff partway in and the guy in front of me leaping to his feet shouting “Bravo!” at the end.Cyril Schäublin’s “Unrest” is defiantly uncategorizable.Seeland FilmproduktionTwo lower-key Asian titles also unfold in coronavirus times, without being overwhelmed by pandemic paranoia. Hong Sangsoo’s “The Novelist’s Film” is another deceptively breezy slice of life from the Korean director, which brought him — a perennial prize taker at the Berlinale — the runner-up Grand Prix award. The notion that this makes the festival’s jury president, M. Night Shyamalan, a de facto member of “the Hong Hive” is remarkable for anyone acquainted with their respective oeuvres — the kind of thought it’s useful to have strike you when you’re having your nose swabbed and want to look loftily away.The accurately named Japanese gem “Small, Slow But Steady” also featured masks, though here we notice the difficulties they present for lip readers. The beautifully absorbing story of a deaf female boxer whose beloved gym is facing closure, ​​Sho Miyake’s affecting drama is miniature in every way except emotional impact. Its bittersweet main idea, about a treasured place facing its imminent end, is writ in larger, bolder, colors in Carla Simón’s “Alcarràs,” which won the Golden Bear, the festival’s top award.“Alcarràs” follows the windy, sun-blasted fortunes of the Solé family, from the Catalonia region of Spain, during the family peach orchard’s last harvest before demolition. It’s a lovely, chattering, life-filled title featuring irresistible performances from its nonprofessional, all-ages ensemble cast. Its triumph here makes it the third consecutive time, after Cannes and Venice, that a major European festival’s highest honor has gone to a woman for her second film.Michael Thomas plays a washed-up club singer in “Rimini.”Ulrich Seidl FilmproduktionBut for all its sunshine and sad, brave wisdom, “Alcarràs” was, for me, outmatched by a much wintrier competition title. Ulrich Seidl’s “Rimini” is an uncompromising, coldly provocative drama that gathered no prizes, which is a shame. But that its star, Michael Thomas, playing a washed-up club singer in an off-season Italian beach town, was not specifically recognized is more or less a crime. My other competition favorite, Natalia López Gallardo’s formally striking debut feature “Robe of Gems,” did pick up the Jury Prize. But otherwise, as has been the case since the Encounters sidebar was inaugurated in 2020, a lot of the more interesting titles ended up there rather than in the main competition.A scene from “Robe of Gems.”Visit FilmsIn particular, Jöns Jönsson’s “Axiom” is a clever examination of the psychology of a compulsive liar. And best of all — in this section, this festival and, for me, this year so far — there’s Cyril Schäublin’s utterly singular “Unrest,” a movie that is defiantly uncategorizable, unless you have a category earmarked “playful, otherworldly tales of watchmaking and anarchism in 1870s Switzerland.”“Unrest” was the most transporting movie I saw in Berlin, at least until I physically transported myself to the city’s planetarium to watch Liz Rosenfeld’s experimental “White Sands Crystal Foxes.” The film itself is a rather exasperatingly overwritten art piece, but the experience was little short of transcendent. Lying under a domed 360-degree projection, suspended amid cascading imagery, I felt pleasantly disembodied. Later, it occurred to me how odd it was to yearn for a return to the real world, just to better escape it again.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      Vicky Krieps Gave Hollywood One More Try. It Wasn’t So Bad.

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      The “Phantom Thread” actress, burned by the experience of promoting the movie in the United States, retreated to art-house obscurity. Now, she’s back in the M. Night Shyamalan blockbuster “Old.”RAMBROUCH, Luxembourg — Four years ago, Vicky Krieps seemed destined for Hollywood stardom. The Luxembourgian actress had emerged from near obscurity to star in Paul Thomas Anderson’s “Phantom Thread,” in which she portrayed the tormented muse of a domineering fashion designer played by Daniel Day-Lewis. Her performance — vulnerable, prickly, anguished — garnered critical raves and suggested the arrival of a major new talent.Then Krieps seemed to vanish, turning down a host of Hollywood offers, including a big-budget action movie, and instead taking smaller roles, mostly in European art-house films and German television.“I needed two years,” she said recently, sitting in the backyard of her family’s 200-year-old home in rural Luxembourg. The experience of being in the public eye, she said, “was almost traumatizing.”This summer, however, Krieps, 37, is back in the spotlight, with lead roles in two movies at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island” and Mathieu Amalric’s “Hold Me Tight”). And in a move that signals an end to her self-imposed Hollywood exile, she is also starring in M. Night Shyamalan’s glossy new horror fable, “Old,” which arrived in U.S. movie theaters on July 23.Krieps, who is self-deprecating and warm in person but prone to earnest tangents about art and nature, said that the notion of “Old” being shown in so many theaters was stressing her out.“I carry this huge paradox: I’ve become an actor, but I don’t want to be seen — it doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “I’m really scared that people might recognize me.”In “Phantom Thread,” Krieps plays the muse and lover of a dressmaker, played by Daniel Day-Lewis.Laurie Sparham/Focus FeaturesIn “Old,” Gael García Bernal and Krieps play a couple who witness their children turn into adults in a span of hours.Universal PicturesIn the film, which also stars Gael García Bernal, she plays a mother of two who, while on a family vacation, becomes trapped on a beach where people grow old at a vastly accelerated rate. Her character, who witnesses her children turn into adults in a span of hours, is the film’s emotional anchor, and Krieps has received widespread praise for her performance.In a Zoom interview, Shyamalan said that he had been a fan of the actress since “Phantom Thread,” and that he had been drawn to her “classical dignity.” He added: “It’s so beautiful having someone of her caliber being so vulnerable at the center of a genre film.”Her decision to do the movie, she said, stemmed from a confluence of factors. Amid the pandemic, she had been thinking a lot about the nature of time: “I felt that the film could tell us something about how we as people live in a construction of time and space, running from A to B, but really running from ourselves.”But she also said she had increasingly come to terms with anxieties that emerged with the release of “Phantom Thread.” At that time, she said, she had approached her career — and life — without much of a plan, and had been unprepared for the promotional demands and industry attention.Krieps, who now mostly lives in Berlin with her two children, said that her desire for self-effacement was largely rooted in her upbringing in Luxembourg, a tiny duchy squeezed between Belgium, France and Germany. The country’s size is conducive to modesty, she said.Krieps said that “Old” had something to say about how people are “running from A to B, but really running from ourselves.”Julien Mignot for The New York TimesA self-described “dreamy” teenager, after high school she left Luxembourg for South Africa, where she spent a year volunteering as a teacher for children with AIDS. While there, she had an epiphany about pursuing an acting career in a damascene moment involving a low-lying mountain that she glimpsed from a road. “I had a deep connection to this mountain and its energy,” she said, “and I decided I wanted to be someone who can capture this feeling, and release it, maybe on a stage.”After enrolling in (and leaving) acting school in Zurich, she cobbled together a living with mostly small roles in German television and film. Then one day she received an email with a video audition request that she distractedly misread on her phone as an invitation to try out for a student film project. “I was sitting on the bus and had just started an interesting conversation with a stranger — you know how it is,” she said.She sent in a submission, recorded on her phone, and it wasn’t until she received a call from her agent alerting her that Anderson had liked the video that she realized it was for “Phantom Thread.”The movie’s press tour, she said, had been a culture shock. She had never had a credit card, and when she arrived in Los Angeles, she was surprised to discover that she would need one to check into her hotel. “I said, ‘I’ll go to a campground — I don’t care.’” (The hotel eventually relented.)Then came her media training: “It was a woman telling me what was wrong about me and to not say my opinions,” she said. “I walked through L.A. in shock, thinking, ‘Oh my God, is this what they want from me?’”That experience cemented her decision to evade international scrutiny by returning to Europe. Her work there included a supporting role in “Das Boot,” a German TV series and, more recently, “Hold Me Tight” in French and “Bergman Island,” Hansen-Love’s long-gestating English-language project. That film, set to be released in the United States on Oct. 15, centers on a filmmaker couple (played by Krieps and Tim Roth) who visit the Swedish island of Faro, where the director Ingmar Bergman once lived.Hansen-Love, a French movie director, said in a telephone interview that Krieps had a “melancholy that is very European” and compared her acting style to that of Isabelle Huppert.“I had thought: ‘Phantom Thread’ will go away again, people will forget me,” Krieps said.Julien Mignot for The New York TimesIn “Bergman Island,” Krieps’s character has a series of encounters that make her question her role as a mother, partner and artist. Krieps said that her character’s search for an identity had also helped her overcome some of her own reluctance about Hollywood.“This woman is trying to find a solution to the question of ‘Who am I?’ and ‘What is real?’ The answer is: There is no real,” she said, adding that the realization had pushed her to become more open-minded about what projects she wanted to pursue.Krieps said she would be willing to make more big-budget American movies in the future, though her post-pandemic schedule is already packed. She recently completed filming “Corsage,” a German-language biopic of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and her upcoming projects include a “Three Musketeers” adaptation and a film by the Belgian director Philippe Van Leeuw, in which she is set to play a United States border agent, her first onscreen attempt at an American accent.Her return to U.S. filmmaking, she added, felt a little bit like closing a book that she had left unopened. “I had thought: ‘Phantom Thread’ will go away again, people will forget me — but I can’t undo this movie,” she said. “It’s like undoing who I am.” More

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      I’m Obsessed With ‘Old.’ The Twist: I Won’t See It.

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      M. Night Shyamalan’s new movie has a trailer that eerily resonates with our strange times; and that’s enough for me.Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, “Old,” which arrived in theaters last week, for no other reason than that I am traveling and haven’t set foot in a theater in almost two years. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. This being a Shyamalan film, the trailer promises they will spend a lot of time looking confused and concerned — the same facial feat Mark Wahlberg sustained across the running time of “The Happening” — and yelling at one another, demanding explanations.This is a familiar, Manichaean, Shyamalan-ish universe: A diverse group of bewildered souls, alone in a menacing void, earnestly playing out whatever endgame logic the scenario dictates. (It’s as though the director were compelled to continually make big-budget versions of “Waiting for Godot” — you think he can’t go on, but he’ll go on.) So we see a family on vacation, headed to the beach. The cast is soon filled out by others: a couple, a 6-year-old girl, a woman in a bikini making smoochie faces at her phone, two more men. Soon enough, the kids find things in the sand: rusted items from their hotel, cracked sunglasses, late-model iPhones. A young bleach-blonde corpse bobs toward a boy in the water. (She did not die of old age, but will decompose in hyperlapse.) Then the real aging begins. Parents confront their kids’ sudden adolescence. The 6-year-old girl grows up, becomes pregnant and gives birth on the beach. Some greater force is afoot, be it fate, God, time, Facebook or nature. Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t care how many travel rewards points or memory-making family vacations you had in real life.Near the start of the trailer, Vicky Krieps’s character dreamily tells her impatient children: “Let’s all start slowing down.” Then everything starts speeding up. At some point she turns to her husband and exclaims, “You have wrinkles!” (The horror!) But of course “Old” will not be an allegory about the importance of sunscreen. What we’re being shown here looks far more like a meditation on mortality wrapped in a cautionary tale about our accelerated lives — about the scariness of time flying and kids growing up too fast, of bodies going to hell and the inescapability of death, and about the ravages we’ve visited upon the Earth, which will remain blanketed in all our fancy garbage long after it has turned us to dust.Part of what’s so captivatingly strange about the trailer is the way it takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into a galloping two-and-a-half-minute highlight reel. Its breakneck, parodic pace calls to mind Tom Stoppard’s “15-Minute Hamlet,” in which all the most famous scenes from Shakespeare’s play are crammed (twice!) into a quarter of an hour. (In a film adaptation I once saw, Ophelia drowned herself by plunging her head into a bucket.) The title alone reduces the existential horror of the premise to a midlife freakout.The graphic novel from which this movie is adapted — “Sandcastle,” written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters — was inspired by Levy’s memories of childhood holidays. “He used to travel a lot to a beach exactly like this one, in the north of Spain,” Peeters told the comics site CBR. “Later, he went back with his own children, and one day he had this idea.” The beach could serve as a microcosm of Western society, “with some of its strong basic figures.” This was not a thriller, Peeters said — “it’s a fable.”It takes a movie that compresses life into a couple of hours and then compresses that into two and a half minutes.Shyamalan may be best known for his last-minute twists, but this was an option the “Sandcastle” authors ultimately decided against. According to Peeters, Levy had written a resolution to the story, a final twist — “but we finally decided it was useless, and would have destroyed the frightening dimension of the book.” The frightening dimension, of course, is that there is no escaping time, or death — and neither is there any simple revelatory twist in life that will explain what you’re meant to be doing with your time here.Anyone converting this source material into a movie has a choice to make: Either you embrace the terrifying meaninglessness of our short lives, or you try to offer consolation with a resolution to the story. The trailer tips its hand that Shyamalan has chosen the latter: The last words we hear are Gabriel Garcia Bernal’s character saying, “We’re here for a reason!” Maybe we are and maybe we are not, but my time on Earth is limited, and any story that attempts to wrap up the problem of life will feel like a waste of it.As I watched this trailer over and over, I was also, coincidentally, in Spain, where I lived for many years while growing up. I am writing from my brother’s new apartment in Madrid, which happens to be next door to the childhood home of a childhood friend. Walking my dog past her building, then meeting with her later, I find myself dwelling on the trailer, on the nature of time passing, on how compressed and accelerated it can feel. It’s strange to sit across from people you met in elementary school but haven’t seen in years. It makes you feel like the couples in the trailer, watching their spouses transform into their future selves. Time seems to pass at an accelerated rate when you return to a place periodically, over a long period, with large gaps in between.During the past year and a half of paralysis — this remote, isolated, slowed-down time, during which some of the most privileged among us were able to isolate in safety and comfort — it could seem as if the future were on hold. (It was not.) Time felt endless and slow until, for me, it accelerated significantly. I lost my mother suddenly. After 18 months of not traveling anywhere, I came back to the city where I lost my father, where my nephews were born, where my parents’ still-living friends have become elderly. It is funny to see how much has changed, and which things never change. I met a friend at a gallery opening and mentioned on arrival that I’d forgotten to iron my dress. He seemed happy to hear this: “You’re still you!” he said.Perhaps, for some of us, last year felt like a pause. But there was no pause. There never is. You look away for a moment, and your kid is tall. Your dog is old. Friends move away. You begin to wonder where this is all going. What’s the twist? When will it arrive? And then maybe you realize where you are, which may be a very old city — old to you and old in history, though not as old as some — and here you are, repeatedly watching a trailer for a movie, feeling a strange feeling.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks and Other Mixed Messages” and a contributing writer for the magazine. More

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      ‘Old’ Review: They Say Sun Can Age You, but This Is Ridiculous

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      A half-hour at the beach costs vacationers a year in this disquieting new horror puzzler, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.In the opening pages of “Dino,” a 1992 biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches, the author cites a haunting Italian phrase: “La vecchiaia è carogna.” “Old age is carrion.”When some vacationing families are deposited on a secluded beach recommended to them by a smarmy resort manager in “Old,” the new movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, we see a trio of vultures atop a tree take to the sky.Not long after that, unusual things begin happening. The young children of Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, both superb, as is the entire cast) feel their bathing suits tightening. An epileptic psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) unexpectedly finds herself without symptoms. The elderly mother of the trophy wife of a tetchy physician just up and dies. A moderately famous rap star (Aaron Pierre), who had come to the beach some hours before, wanders around befuddled, with an incurable nosebleed. The corpse of his female companion is discovered in the water, prompting the physician (Rufus Sewell) to accuse the rapper of murder.In time — not too much time, because, as it happens, it is of the essence in this situation — the beachgoers figure out that they are aging at an accelerated rate. One half-hour equals about a year.And the beach that is aging them won’t let them leave.Some vacation. Shyamalan adapted his disquieting tale from the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by the French writer Pierre Oscar Lévy and the Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. As is frequently the case with French-produced bandes dessinées, “Sandcastle” is a stark existentialist parable. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the book Krieps’s character attempts to read on the beach is a dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Shyamalan expands on the book in the way one would expect an American filmmaker to — among other things, eventually offering a sort-of explanation that the source material doesn’t.Being PG-13, “Old” does not dwell, as the graphic novel does, on how rapid aging affects the children of this ensemble in the hormonal department once they hit their teens, although one pregnancy does occur during the victims’ shared life-in-a-day. Instead, the movie buckles down on the considerable anxiety and dread felt, and amplified, by the frequently bickering adults. Because time is accelerated here, wounds heal incredibly quickly. The director exploits this for a couple of weirdly harrowing knife fights and an impromptu surgery scene. The horrific potential of bones breaking, then instantly resetting themselves incorrectly, does not go unnoticed.Shyamalan’s fluid filmmaking style, outstanding features of which are an almost ever-mobile camera and a bag of focus tricks, serves him especially well here. Sometimes the camera will pan back and forth in a ticktock pendulum fashion (get it?) and return to its starting point to reveal a terrifying change. The way he switches out his actors as their characters age is seamless. (The filmmaker’s work in the verbal department is not so felicitous. He names Pierre’s rap star “Mid-Sized Sedan”; early on one character complains to another, “You’re always thinking about the future, and it makes me feel not seen.”)If old age is carrion, it’s also, as a “Citizen Kane” character put it, the one disease you don’t look forward to curing, which provides the impetus for the movie’s finale. While Shyamalan is often cited for his tricky endings, it’s arguable that he doesn’t quite stick the landing with this one. He adds to the story a dollop of that much-venerated Hollywood commodity, hope, and also doles out some anti-science propaganda that couldn’t be more unwelcome at this particular time in the real world.OldRated PG-13 for horrific imagery, language and aging. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More