Old + The Exterminating Angel

• Thursday, August 28 at 6:15pm (Old) + 8:30pm (The Exterminating Angel)
• Wednesday, September 3 at 1:30pm (Old) + 3:45pm (The Exterminating Angel)

Old
M. Night Shyamalan, 2021, U.S., 108m
A family of four (Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Alex Wolff, and Thomasin McKenzie) joins a group of strangers on a remote, Edenic beach where time accelerates rapidly, aging them decades in a single day. M. Night Shyamalan turns this Twilight Zone-inflected premise (loosely adapted from the graphic novel Sandcastle) into a parable of mortality, medical anxiety, and the quiet terror of nature outrunning our comprehension. Shot on sun-bleached 35mm by Mike Gioulakis, the film uses elliptical editing, wide lenses, and subtle “Texan switch” sleights to convey the film’s uncanny sense of duration without overt visual effects. Released in the summer of 2021, Old resonated with a world still reeling from pandemic stress—a strange, prescient fable about the ethics of medicine and the disorienting sensation of time being both hyper-accelerated and eerily suspended.

Followed by:

The Exterminating Angel
Luis Buñuel, 1962, Mexico, 93m
Spanish with English subtitles
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist takedown of the frivolous upper class strands a group of elegant dinner guests in a lavish drawing room, and then refuses to let them leave. Post-supper dawdling gives way to claustrophobic inertia as civility unravels and primal instincts rise to the surface. Shot in Mexico with an ensemble led by Silvia Pinal, The Exterminating Angel remains one of Buñuel’s most masterful and incisive social dissections: a darkly funny, increasingly eerie chamber piece where social codes collapse into inexplicable savagery, or is it inexplicable? To this day a lively, biting, macabre comedy that was controversial in its time (and banned in Franco-era Spain for its anti-elite subtext), yet its core themes still resonate with uncanny oracular power.