Stephen King has been more than happy to share his film and television recommendations with his millions of social media followers, and that even extends to titles that haven’t even been released yet. Fans of the prolific author will no doubt take each and every one of his suggestions on board, and the latest addition to his watch list is M. Night Shyamalan’s Old.
The problem with the filmmaker’s work is that you never know what kind of Shyamalan you’re going to get, with Glass squandering the potential of a Split/Unbreakable crossover by going out of its way to subvert expectations, to the extent that the third act audiences had been looking forward to wound up as an anticlimactic damp squib.
However, the first trailer for Old that premiered during the Super Bowl is nothing if not intriguing, but it hints at just the merest shred of the mystery at the center of the story. Inspired by acclaimed graphic novel Sandcastle, the premise follows a group of characters trapped on a beach, where a mysterious phenomenon begins to age them every thirty minutes.
It sounds like the sort of novel high concept chiller that King would churn out, so it’s only fitting that the horror legend let it be known that he’s planning a trip to the theater to check it out on the biggest screen possible, as you can see below.
I caught a glimpse of this during the Superbowl. Looks really good. I hope I can go to a theater and see it.https://t.co/uuz0wEqFWU
— Stephen King (@StephenKing) February 12, 2021
An existential psychological thriller with a one of a kind hook has the potential to be something special, but the jury will remain out on Old until we discover whether or not Shyamalan has managed to rein his overindulgences, which has been a regular issue with his output over the last two decades.