Several families staying in a resort visit, on the recommendation of the manager, a secluded and secret beach. The discovery of a corpse in the water, however, inaugurates a series of phenomena that seem to be related to the functioning of time: the place where they are is making them age.
Time
is built on this premise
, the latest work by the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan which, despite not starting from an original idea - it is an adaptation of the cartoon
Sand Castle
(2010), by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy, published in Spain for Astiberri–, fits the canon of a career dominated by
high concept
, a term used for movies with an easy-to-sell idea in a few words. Or to become memes: even the director has shared on Twitter some of the humorous publications about "the beach that makes you old" that emerged as a result of the premiere of
Tiempo
in the United States.
Received with the traditional division of opinions in her career, with the exception of the closed applause obtained with
The Sixth Sense
(1999) and the almost unanimous vilification of
Airbender, the last warrior
(2010),
Time
has helped Shyamalan reach a mark that no one It will argue with you: It has topped the American box office in four different decades. In Spain, the film has also been number one despite being released in the same week as the latest Disney blockbuster,
Jungle Cruise
. And, as is also usual in him, it has already been profitable: it has raised 65 million dollars (more than 55 million euros) worldwide, with a budget of only 18 million (just 15 million euros). From the
sixth sense
, there is no director and screenwriter title that has been under budget at the box office, even when it has moved in large numbers. Shyamalan complies commercially.
On the artistic level, however, things change ... depending on who you ask. David Ehrlich,
Indiewire
journalist
and one of the most widely read international critics, has been especially cruel in dismissing
Time
as a "very stupid" film and, at the same time, the best work of the filmmaker since 2004. Ehrlich stops at one point generally most discussed in his cinema: the dialogues, whose quality he compares, in this case, to that of psychopathic killer tapes where adolescent couples announce that they are heading to the shed to have a sexual encounter, only to die moments later. "You have a beautiful voice, what you want to hear when you grow up", says to his daughter, at the beginning of the film, the father played by Gael García Bernal.
A moment from the movie Time, by M. Night Shyamalan.
Among European specialists, who tend to hold Shyamalan in the highest esteem,
Tiempo
has been welcomed with interest.
Even enthusiasm, as is the case of Desirée de Fez, a member of the Sitges Festival selection committee and one of the great authorities on fantasy and horror films in Spain.
Consulted by ICON, De Fez does not hesitate to consider
Tiempo
a "very important, original, unique and full of ideas" film.
The journalist published last year the book
Reina del grito.
A journey through female fears
(Ed. Blackie Books), where she analyzes her relationship with horror films based on the personal fears that she has faced at different stages, such as the "fear of not being accepted" in adolescence or the "fear of exploiting ”In her first pregnancy. In this sense, he affirms that
Time
has “touched him a lot”. “The fears that you go through throughout your life appear synthesized in a very short period. It makes you think about the fear of loss, that everything goes too fast, not making the right decisions or death ”, develops De Fez.
For the analyst, despite Shyamalan's idea of the years passing relentlessly in a matter of minutes,
Time
is a "luminous and optimistic film, which reminds us that we must always live in the present." Desirée de Fez hosts the podcast on genre cinema Tide Nocturnal and recently also Reinas del Grito, where she talks about terror with other women. In the first, on the occasion of the special program dedicated to the director, he defined Shyamalan as "one of the most important contemporary filmmakers." “He is an author who tells his stories with total freedom, who does not give in to the fashions of the moment and takes risks of all kinds. In
Tiempo, it is
not afraid to go into gardens, and it does so knowing in advance that not everyone is going to connect ”, explains the journalist.
Early success and sins of youth
The sixth sense
marked M. Night Shyamalan's career in 1999 for its enormous and unexpected impact when no one knew him.
The director had not reached his thirties, although he had already released two feature films -
Praying with Anger
(1994) and
The First Friends
(1998) - and co-wrote the screenplay by
Stuart Little
(1999).
David Vogel, who headed Disney's Buena Vista live-action productions division, was the first heavyweight to believe in Shyamalan - just reading the script for
The Sixth Sense
, agreed to buy it for three million dollars with the clause that its author would also direct it.
Disney, calling him crazy, fired Vogel, sold the production rights and was left with only the distribution.
The rest is history: the firing was right and the film was an event, which swept the box office and garnered six Oscar nominations.
Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel in 'The Incident' (2008), by M. Night Shyamalan.FOX
But there was a trade-off to success: everything Shyamalan did from now on would meet that bar. And all his endings were also going to be subject to the expectation of a surprise, because of the turn of
The Sixth Sense
, one of the most iconic in the history of cinema. Thus, progressively, the reception of critics and the public became more and more lukewarm. The director maintained the good feelings with
El protege
(2000), now revalued for the way in which he anticipated the superhero fever and for how he deconstructs the narrative of the subgenre. With the much more extravagant
signs
(2002), where he openly bet on humor and a risky religious theme, he continued to obtain a majority favor, clearly broken into his subsequent triad:
The forest
(2004),
The young woman from the water
(2006) and
The incident
(2008 ).
In his episode about Shyamalan, Mikey Neumann, the
youtuber
behind Movies with Mikey, a program hosted on the film analysis channel FilmJoy, offered a theory: there was a parallel between the evolution of his filmography and the growing importance of his usual cameos. In
Signs
, the director played the person responsible for the protagonist's wife being dead: he was, therefore, the one who activated the central conflict. In
The Forest
, he reserved his appearance for the final surprise twist, as a signature. And in
the young woman of the water
, directly, assumed a messianic role, since the destiny of the world passed through a book that his character had written. In this film, in addition, he caricatured the critics by representing a film journalist who never succeeds in his analysis and dies in a humiliating way.
The hints of
enfant terrible
did not end there. In the pre-production of
The Young
Woman in
the Water,
his famous divorce from Disney took place: Shyamalan left for Warner, considering that the studio was not showing the due emotion for the film. For example, when his assistant brought the script to executive Nina Jacobson's house, she was delayed because she was taking her son to a birthday party, something the director considered an outrage. Facts like this are collected in the book
The Man Who Heard Voices
('The man who heard voices', 2006 and unpublished in Spain), by sports journalist Michael Bamberger, a friend of the filmmaker.
Written in the manner of the stories of saints, the book compares Shyamalan with Bob Dylan, Picasso, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, and shows, involuntarily, a creator devoured by his ego who, paradoxically regarding the title, does not attend at the discretion of others.
M. Night Shyamalan, on the set of 'The Visit'.
During the production of
The Forest, he
also participated in the mockumentary
The Secret of M. Night Shyamalan
(Nathaniel Kahn, 2004), which attributed supernatural gifts, to which Bamberger gives some credit in his book (“I felt a powerful force emanating from he ”, he writes).
"You have to add twists, Dr. Crowe."
A constant in Shyamalan's cinema is the self-conscious character with which his stories unfold. It is striking that the film with which the director once again occupied a place of relevance in horror cinema, after his hiatus with the fantastic blockbusters
Airbender, the last warrior
and
After Earth
(2013), was a return to such essences as transparent and
visit
(2015), reinventing the subgenre of found footage (
found footage
), the director became involved footage to the treated, in fiction, a montage prepared by the co -
star girl aspiring film student.
In this way, the most elementary narrative mechanisms, such as cuts, planning or music, became details integrated into the action: at times, the film functioned as a kind of cinematographic writing, for example, with the girl making explicit an editing strategy that takes on its climax to get excited.
This is a frequent question in the director's cinema.
In a scene from
The Sixth Sense
, not without a certain malice, the child protagonist uglies the psychologist played by Bruce Willis who does not know how to tell stories and insists that he must add twists.
The child knows something about the nature of that psychologist that he is not yet aware of: the film itself presents a double conflict where the one who seems to be helped is, in fact, the one who is helping the other.
Or, put another way, the one who is telling you the story.
In
Signals
, scattered aspects in the plot must be detected by the patriarch of the family, a reverend who has lost faith, as tools placed by God (or the narrator, which is the same for that matter) in order to save him and the yours from aliens.
In the opinion of Desirée de Fez, this self-conscious element is also found in
Time
. “There is a very interesting meta-narrative thing. I do not think it is an addition, because it starts from the beginning of the film and was probably in its genesis, "says the expert. The
cameo
with which Shyamalan is visible, on this occasion, comes at the beginning: he is the driver of the coach that takes the characters to the beach, a perhaps unsubtle way of asserting himself as responsible for the events. Both the beginning and the end of
Time
are not in the original comic, but are the own production of its director and screenwriter.
The author of
Scream Queen
explains that, at the time of
The Forest
, possibly the film with the most controversial turn in Shyamalan's career, the director may have been "pressured" to "not disappoint and offer surprise endings", but From
The Visit
, he has noticed him “more playful than normal, more perverse, uncomplexed and festive, although just as bright and intelligent”. However, he does feel that at the end of
Time he
has tended to over-explain. “Shyamalan is aware that we are at a time when cinema is required to be very clear. It seems that open or ambiguous endings generate a bit of rejection ”, considers De Fez.
In
Multiple
(2017), the filmmaker raised one of the most bizarre twists of his filmography: it was a covert sequel to
El protege
. However, the film, which followed a man with 32 personalities, included more references to his work, such as the fact that one of those personalities was in
Signs
or that part of the ending sequence recreated the end of
The Forest
. As if the filmmaker also wanted to talk about his multiple author personalities. In case it opened the door, too, to a sequel to
The Sixth Sense
, Haley Joel Osment (now 33 years old) was quick to publicly declare her interest in reprising the role that brought her fame, the boy Cole.
It doesn't seem like it's going to happen, as Shyamalan recently confessed to
GQ
that
The Sixth Sense
was not one of his favorite movies and that he preferred
The Girl in the Water
.
Another self-claim that, according to Desirée de Fez to ICON, will become less necessary over the years: “Films that were received in a lukewarm or even hostile way have ended up being repositioned.
Some are now considered among the best in Shyamalan. "
Matter of time.
You can follow ICON on
,
,
, or subscribe here to the
Newsletter
.