In an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, M. Night Shyamalan discusses taking big swings, trying to be a maverick and tells them of his desire to “...continually risk and risk and risk and risk and not want to keep myself safe, which is what I felt when I was younger.” Looking back at a career that’s spanned almost 30 years but really picked up with 1999’s The Sixth Sense, you can easily see that free-wheeling, go-for-broke mentality that brought incredible highs and crash-landing lows. Films that weren’t appreciated when they were initially released have been assessed and re-assessed multiple times. Everyone has a favorite (and hated) M. Night film. The fact is, there’s something here with M. Night Shyamalan that makes even his biggest misses seem intriguing in the grand scheme of things.

What’s fascinating about his latest is that, in a career that’s given us everything from Unbreakable to Lady in the Water, Old might not be his best work, but it’s easily his most disturbing. It’s also his weirdest and, yes, bravest piece of work yet.

It starts almost slyly and benignly, with a bunch of character exposition and teasing bits of dialogue around the idea of aging and wishing away time. While he’s a master of staging shots and thematic set design, his scripts—particularly their dialogue—are not always in keeping with his stature as a director. It’s no different here, as he introduces a quintessentially cute family with Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) as the husband and wife and Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River) as their children. 11-year-old Maddox has a lovely singing voice when she’s allowed to be spontaneous and 6-year-old Trent loves puzzles and has a knack of remembering everyone’s name and occupation. Prisca pokes at her kids with wistfully wishing to hear Maddox’s singing voice when she’s older while reminding them to live in the moment. It’s a bit on the nose for a film that will literally address both points.

They are on a shuttle enroute to a gorgeous retreat that Prisca found online. It seems too good to be true, with a smiling Resort Manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) awaiting their arrival with specially made cocktails for the adults and a 24-hour candy station for the kids. In their hotel room, cinematographer Mike Gioulakis keeps the camera playful, tracking the family from the outside, through their very open and windowed room and watching the family dynamics at work.

Guy playfully teases the kids who then attack him with hugs while Prisca watches from the outside with Gioulakis, as her smile grows haunted, showing cracks in the happy family’s facade. A little later, it’s revealed through a fight that Prisca plans to leave Guy and that she has a potentially fatal medical condition. She wants this vacation to be their last happy memory as a family. It's here that the sometimes flimsy dialogue by M. Night continues to be a little too on-the-nose. An actuary who focuses on statistics, Guy’s too busy thinking about the future it makes her feel unseen. Prisca meanwhile works in a museum and is “always thinking of the past.”

Why can’t they just be in the present!

Before you can groan at the too-perfect set-up, the hotel manager shows up with the perfect place for them: a secluded beach, impossible to find and surrounded by rocks. “A natural anomaly” he only recommends to certain guests. But when they get in the shuttle (manned, of course, by M. Night), they discover they’re not the only guests the manager has told.

Charles (Rufus Sewell), an older doctor with a much younger, beauty-obsessed wife named Chrystal (Abbey Lee), their daughter Kara (Mikaya Fisher) and Charles elderly mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant) are also on the shuttle. And they’re eventually joined on the beach by Jarin (Ken Leung) and his wife Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and discover that a famous rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) is already at the beach, huddled in the corner. Tension quickly escalates as a dead woman washes ashore, Sedan’s nose begins bleeding and Charles immediately believes he killed the woman. Then Agnes’ heart begins to give out. And before you know it, Trent, Maddox and Kara are now teenagers.

Oh and Kara quickly becomes pregnant.

As the group spirals out of control trying to figure out what’s going on and how to escape, Trent notices that someone is watching them. And not only do they have to worry about the supernatural forces that are aging them two years every hour, they also have to worry about each other as tensions rise and violence seems poised to break out.

Based on the French graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters, M. Night’s vision of aging is filled with split-second decisions and discombobulating changes. A pregnancy quickly comes to term and ends in tragedy because of the speed in which they age. But this flash-aging process also adds intriguing complications to the cast of characters and their decisions. How do you perform surgery when the wound instantly closes up into a scar within seconds? How would dementia complicate situations as the years pass in thirty minute increments? The accompanying effects work sell the horror moments involving massive tumors, surgery and worse as the film races towards its conclusion.

The camerawork playfully captures the action and creates both moments of utter intensity and subversion of expectations as it tilts back and forth. Old is never not a visually exciting film. Where the film stumbles is the dialogue, as the characters often explain what’s happening while it’s happening and the script puts extra pressure on its young cast who are required to act like children even as their bodies have aged into their teens and adulthood. This dichotomy creates a surreal experience as the actors recite lines that feel awkward in the mouth. Coupled with the morality tale/fairy tale nature the film takes for most of the runtime, the acting feels just this side of not right.

Where you can see thirty years of filmmaking experience is in M. Night’s assured control of setting, camerawork and plotting. Horror and jolts come just when they’re needed, goosing either the audience or the characters just when complications are needed. And as the film pushes towards the twist (you know it’s coming, don’t lie), Old reveals itself to be a bleak piece of nihilistic science fiction. What begins as a fairytale of a family imploding under expectations and outside forces becomes bigger, with intriguing connotations and surprises. You might have an idea of where the story is going (and M. Night dutifully puts breadcrumbs for those paying attention), but, like a good twist, it’s not the twist that’s interesting but the revelations it brings to the film we’ve watched.

Special mention must be given to the makeup team, including Stephen Bettles with prosthetics and Tony Gardner (Hocus Pocus, 127 Hours) with makeup effects design because the aging effects with the adults is subtly fantastic. The changes happen quietly throughout the film until you realize, through close-ups, that the young parents we’ve been following are well into their twilight years. It’s a stunning transformation that’s not showy, but is as equally assured as M. Night’s direction. What is showy, though, are the violent deaths of twisted bodies and poisoned flesh that tiptoe right up to that PG-13 rating and while this gorehound was begging for it to stumble past the line into R-rated territory, it still managed to be incredibly effective, thanks in large part to the audio design and unsettling and propulsive score by Trevor Gureckis (Servant).

Shyamalan has always been earnest and Old is no different. But earnestness is sometimes accompanied by silliness and some of Old’s darker impulses are almost sidelined by humorous interjections to the point where you’re not sure if the humor is intentional or if it has slid into unintentional camp. In the hyperreal world M. Night has created, I’m not sure it matters. Old is emblematic of M. Night’s idiosyncratic filmmaking style firing on all cylinders and blasting off into the next phase of his career. With a generation of films behind him, you’re either along for the ride or looking for a different destination vacation. It takes huge swings and shows a director who isn’t inclined to stick to the status quo that defined his earlier films. It might not be his most successful film, but there’s a twinkle of mischief in his eye that makes me excited to see what this new stage in life will bring.