Sixteen More Screams For Halloween: Day 8 (Old)

Oh, God. Well, it's our first dance with M. Night Shymalan on this here blog. I remember seeing The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable at the time they came out. I think I even knew the big twist of The Sixth Sense at the time, and I'm not sure how I came to know that considering it came out in like 1999. I tapped out somewhere around Signs, save for the last movie of his I watched. That would be The Last Airbender. Readers, I trust you will forgive me my reluctance to return to his filmography after that. Regardless, somehow we made it here. I have to talk, for a certain length of time, about M. Night Shymalan's 2021 film about The Beach That Makes You Old. Let's, uh... let's try to do that?

I say try because I bounced off of this movie hella hard. It is not as if this movie's premise is too rock fucking stupid to work. A bunch of people trapped on a secluded resort beach which rapidly ages them, from which there is no escape due to the metaphysical fuckery of the advanced aging giving them the sci-fi bends if they try to leave the way they came? It could work. Some parts do work, like the slow descent into madness of the doctor character or the fucked-up payoff to his wife having a calcium deficiency that eventually leads to body horror. Or the bit where someone's tumor rapidly expands and has to be surgically removed. It is not as if this film is total garbage all around. Other parts, like the kids who rapidly grow up and "play" and then one of them's pregnant? What in the fuck? More to the point, the acting and dialogue all around just put me at a distance from the film. I don't usually complain about that shit, but here we are. And yet, there's still some poignancy, like the scene where the main couple of the film age to death and share one last bittersweet moment together. 

Of course, being Shymalan, there has to be a twist ending to it all. The twist ending is that this is all grotesque experiments by Big Pharma, to test out drugs against various conditions by slipping people with said diseases the test drugs and then tricking them onto the beach which makes them old, to monitor how they react to the drugs over a lifetime in one day. It's cruel capitalism at its worst, parading around in a "needs of the many" mask. OH, YOU WANT TO TAKE YOUR CHILDREN TO THE BEACH? YES! YES, I WILL TRICK YOU AND YOUR KIDS ONTO THE BEACH! I CONDEMN YOU TO DEATH IN THE NAME OF MY RESEARCH! The end of the movie papers a line about how this whole scheme gets uncovered and the people behind it punished in the end, but like... Man, why didn't you make a movie about that? Shymalan kind of did, I guess, in that this was what was happening all along. On another level, it's just a microcosm of people getting old rapidly and surprise, it was capitalism. M. Night Shymalan has done what I thought impossible: he made a movie critical of capitalistic death drive at the expense of ordinary people and made me bored of it. I honestly just should have rewatched A Cure For Wellness again, if that's the kind of spooky movie I wanted tonight, and you should too. Let's just leave this movie to age to death on the beach and something something I'm done.