There’s a certain fascination in watching truly terrible movies — particularly the ones in which absolutely everything misfires. The latest M. Night Shyamalan horror film, Old, is so bad it really ought to finish his career.

However, nothing but death itself can put a stop to Shyamalan. Because no matter how many bad films he’s made — and he’s made a lot of them — they’ve been so shockingly profitable as a whole that he’ll always have a place at Hollywood’s table.

After his spectacular flameout with the 2006 fiasco Lady in the Water, accompanied by reports of Shyamalan’s monumental on-set arrogance, I’d had hopes that he might redeem himself by sticking with the quiet, low-budget films he started doing after his many expensive flops. A few of them he’s even financed himself, because that way, he “can make the most interesting art.”

Art or not, I liked a lot about his low-budget 2015 horror film The Visit, which was one of Shyamalan’s many hits. It had problems — a terrible, tacked-on happy ending, for example — but much of it was nicely atmospheric and insightful about the specifically scary horror of old age.

Old seems like it should be a project closely related to The Visit, but it’s so incompetently done that the differences between the films are all the more striking. Based on the 2010 French-language graphic novel Sandcastle by Swiss authors Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old has a darkly fantastical premise involving a secluded beach at a fancy island resort where guests are transported for what’s supposed to be a day-trip, only to find themselves trapped there and aging at a super-accelerated rate.

Gael García Bernal stars, and it’s painful to watch him look so lost in this wretched material. Because he’s so talented, Bernal still manages to salvage a few scenes late in the film. But overall, it’s astonishing how even he seems unconvincing, clearly an actor trying to pretend he’s this weirdly passive insurance actuary named Guy, going along politely for this tropical vacation ride, a husband about to lose his wife to another man after agreeing to one last family event. Bernal’s lack of chemistry with Vicky Krieps, the actor playing the wife/mother character Prisca, is so shocking that I can’t believe Shyamalan ever screen-tested the two of them together. Their first scene plays as if they were introduced literally minutes before cameras rolled.

The two kids playing the children Trent and Maddox are no more convincing in this patently fake, thrown-together “family.” Not their fault, I’m sure — nothing in the film gels. It’s so transparent early on that the unctuous, smiling resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) is a villain that very little suspense is built. His weird, exclusive offer of a day trip to the secluded beach, supposedly because they look like such a nice family, is obviously a sinister trap. Once they’re on the beach and provided with far too many provisions for a single day, it’s equally clear that they’re part of some dreadful experiment, especially once the hilltop cameras are spotted surveilling them. It’s just a matter of wondering what the experiment turns out to be.

These aren’t even spoilers, I assure you — the narrative arc is far too predictable for that. The only ones who can’t figure out what’s going on are the characters on the beach, as they shriek, bicker, fall apart, and attack one another. Most of them aren’t going to end up dying of old age even on that beach, they’re so intent on murdering each other or making manifestly suicidal attempts at escape.

You still might hold out hope that there will be some interesting visceral effects for the rapid-aging scenes. Don’t. The most obvious things, such as graying hair getting longer by the minute and fast-growing fingernails and toenails, are written out of the script with a line of dialogue speculating that, maybe because hair and nails are made up of dead cells already, they’re not growing on the beach — which makes absolutely zero sense. People’s skin doesn’t sag either. The best guess as to the reason for this is that Shyamalan couldn’t face the expense or the continuity nightmare involved in the constant physical transformation of multiple characters.

It’s a shame, because the idea has potential. Our horror of aging even in real time is bad enough. Imagine the fantastical ghastliness of aging one year every thirty minutes, meaning an adult arriving on the beach has probably a day or so to live. Well, Shyamalan tries to imagine it, and he does a rotten job.

Surely something could’ve been done, in a film shot in the Dominican Republic during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, to enrich the topical aspect of the plot involving the way people serve as unwitting lab rats in a monstrous profit-driven health care system. But Shyamalan doesn’t develop that theme. He’s only interested in what he calls the “we blink, and everything changes” nature of aging, and, ironically, that’s exactly what he fails to get across.

Instead of anything harshly visual that would truly haunt the imagination, Shyamalan relies on very subtle skin-wrinkling, plus acting, to convey advancing age.

But the acting isn’t up to the job either. One character, a heavily made-up, fitness-obsessed blonde named Chrystal (Abbey Lee), suffers from a calcium deficiency and has come to the secluded beach without her medication. Her makeup gets heavier and uglier, and she stoops and staggers around under a flowing scarf to hide her hunching back. Ultimately, she winds up killing herself while thrashing around in a confined space that breaks all of her fragile bones. Her mangled corpse, a jungle gym of fractured bones sticking out every which way, is the only major special effect in the film, and it’s a laughably stupid one.

Almost equally ludicrous is the fate of Chrystal’s wealthy surgeon husband, Charles (poor Rufus Sewell). His mental breakdown leads to such compulsive stabbiness that he reminded me of the psychotic bank-robbing robot Roberto in Futurama, whose mania is knifing everything in sight, and who warns in his frantic whine, “Stand back, I gotta practice my stabbin’!”

As for the several children on the island, they’re recast every half hour or so to keep pace with their swift maturation. The first sign of accelerated aging for this group is that the kids are outgrowing their clothes. A few hours later, as teenagers, two of the kids hook up — Guy and Prisca’s son, Trent (Alex Wolff), and Charles and Chrystal’s daughter, Kara (Eliza Scanlen). A short while later, they walk out casually onto the beach, apparently unaware that Kara is hugely pregnant, which rather gives away what they’ve been doing — one of the many unintentional laughs in the film.

It’s tempting to blame Shyamalan for everything, since he directed, produced, and wrote the screenplay. He’s always had a lame, clueless side to him, and it’s really manifested itself here in what seem to be insufficiently developed characters, awkwardly acted scenes, and embarrassing dialogue. The best example I can give of his cringeworthiness is that one of the two black characters on the beach is a rapper whose name is “Mid-Sized Sedan” (Aaron Pierre).

As the authors of the source material, Lévy and Peeters are no doubt at fault for much of this train wreck. But, frankly, it’s more fun to blame Shyamalan. He’s the one who adapted the graphic novel into a film and created something that, when it’s not grotesquely funny, is so boring you feel that, even at a hyper-accelerated pace, these characters aren’t aging and dying nearly fast enough.