Shyamalan's second globalist conspiracy thriller in a row is a janky old-school affair that, much like Hitchcock's Rear Window is a film about filmmaking, at least in the figurative sense. The passage and elision of time is made possible by the manipulation of film form; Shyamalan offers one of his more thematically rigorous cameos in recent years as the observational scientist working behind the camera; impossible situations are rendered possible above all through the manipulation of perception.

With this taken into account, the figurative dimensions of this film as a thematic work about its own making are its most interesting. Where the film is less cohesive is in its actual, on-the-ground science-fiction hocus-pocus plot, which only occasionally reaches the affectual heights of Shyamalan's previous work. The best scenes in this film are the pregnancy scare and the scene in which Guy declares to his wife "I have forgotten what the word is... for the way I feel for you," both of which boil down near-everyday experiences into janky, cinematically coherent weirdness.

On rewatch, I will be interested to evaluate Old's near-overbearing emphasis on expository motion and narrative cohesion: this is another component of the film that surprisingly adds rather than detracts from its dimensions - but only just.