Directors have been scrawling their stories in the sand since the beginnings of cinema: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali’s 1929 surrealist masterpiece Un Chien Andalou ended with a couple half-buried on a beach; Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr looked a good deal livelier writhing together in the waves in From Here to Eternity; and Charlton Heston found the clue to a cosmic riddle poking out of the sand in Planet of the Apes.
The director François Ozon has spent much of his career on the beach in films such as the sun-kissed shocker Regarde la Mer and the psychological drama Under the Sand, so it’s tempting to imagine the sort of suspense he would have brought to Old, a new thriller confined to a secluded tropical cove. Unfortunately, M Night Shyamalan – the shlock-pedlar behind The Sixth Sense and Split – got there first. That’s the way the sandcastle crumbles.
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