sandcastle by frederik peeters and pierre oscar lévy

Whatever it is, it clearly doesn’t care how many travel rewards points or memory-making family vacations you had in real life. Some greater force is afoot, be it fate, God, time, Facebook or nature. The 6-year-old girl grows up, becomes pregnant and gives birth on the beach. Parents confront their kids’ sudden adolescence.

(She did not die of old age, but will decompose in hyperlapse.) Then the real aging begins. A young bleach-blonde corpse bobs toward a boy in the water. Soon enough, the kids find things in the sand: rusted items from their hotel, cracked sunglasses, late-model iPhones. 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. (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. 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. 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. Naturally, they try to figure out what’s happening, floating theories and freaking out. The trailer introduces us to some people who become trapped on a remote beach, where they begin to age at an insanely accelerated pace. But in the past few weeks, I have watched its trailer over and over, enthralled by its combination of existential horror and unintended humor. 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. Let me say up front that I do not expect to see M.

Sandcastle by frederik peeters and pierre oscar lévy