108 min | PG-13 | July 23, 2021 | Universal Pictures
A family wanders onto a beautiful beach that ages them two years every hour. Childhood, marriage, and mortality collapse into a single afternoon. The concept is terrifying until Shyamalan explains it.
A married couple takes their two young children to a tropical resort. A staff member steers them toward a secluded beach reserved for select guests. The sand ages everyone who stands on it, and one hour costs about two years of a life. The children become teenagers before lunch and adults by dinner. The film builds itself around the one dread nobody escapes. Time takes the body and everyone in it, and it refuses to slow down.
Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps play Guy and Prisca, a couple who plan to separate and now watch their children outgrow them in an afternoon. Krieps finds the grief in a mother who loses the childhoods she meant to protect. Alex Wolff plays Trent as a grown man who still speaks with the cadence of a six-year-old, and the gap between the body and the voice is the most unsettling thing in the film. Thomasin McKenzie does the same work as Maddox, an adult who keeps asking childlike questions. Rufus Sewell plays Charles, a surgeon whose mind decays faster than his body, and he fixates on the name of an actor he cannot remember. Sewell turns that small lapse into the film’s real menace.
M. Night Shyamalan writes and directs, adapting the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frédérik Peeters. He stages the beach with a restless camera that pans across the group and refuses to cut. The lens swings from one face to another and withholds the moment of change, so a body has already aged by the time the camera returns to it. The technique generates real dread out of almost nothing. Then the dialogue undercuts it. Shyamalan writes people who narrate their own feelings and explain the plot to each other, and the actors cannot say these lines and stay human.
The premise is a great engine. Aging as horror needs no monster and no backstory. Shyamalan has the image and the dread, and then he cannot leave them alone. The final act stops the beach to explain itself, and the explanation is smaller than the mystery it answers. A film about the terror of time settles for a tidy reason, and the reason is far less frightening than the sand. The idea deserves a filmmaker who trusts it.