Old
Bruce Steele: I think the key lesson of the creepy new film Old is, if writer-director M. Night Shyamaylan, in the guise of a shuttle driver, offers you a ride to a private beach paradise, just sock him in the jaw. Did you enjoy your journey into Shyamalan's latest nightmare?
Edwin Arnaudin: Yes, but not as much as I’d hoped. In your sage words, the story of a few groups of guests at a tropical resort who mysteriously age at an accelerated rate while being unable to leave the secluded seaside nook “gives good trailer” and had me psyched for the movie itself. While much of its first hour showcases some of Shyamalan’s best filmmaking to date in the service of a mind-boggling scenario, it’s undermined by some of the same frustrating weaknesses that have plagued even his greatest hits.
Bruce: I really liked his 2016 psychopath thriller Split, in part because we didn't sit through the film waiting for the Big Reveal, as is the case in many of his movies. That includes this one, and the pay-off here is slim. The idea of watching your family age two years an hour — the youngest starting at 5 and winding up in middle age — is fascinating, in a disconcerting way, but a lot of the possibilities that premise raises go unexplored in Old.
The central family headed by Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps, Phantom Thread) has some vague marital tension to resolve but little else to hold our interest. The supporting players are even less fleshed out: the volatile physician (Rufus Sewell) and his mother (Kathleen Chalfont), trophy wife (Abbey Lee), and young daughter; the inexplicably passive rapper (Aaron Pierre); and the childless couple (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Ken Leung) seem to exist chiefly to execute various plot points.
Edwin: There’s not much reason to care about any of them, though they’re identifiable enough character types that it’s easy to project your own life experiences and people they remind you of onto them. In turn, tenuous bonds are established with these tragic figures, but the dialogue is so silly (and amateurishly performed, Sewell and, to a large extent, Krieps aside) and the aging effects so inconsistently employed that there’s more head-scratching than body-tensing.
And to your initial point, I too thought Shyamalan had outgrown his “big twist” crutch, which, in his post-Village, pre-Split career wasteland has really only resurfaced in the miserable The Visit. I suspect the horrifying events would be far more effective on their own in a straight supernatural thriller, and while the answer is conceptually intriguing, it’s presented in such a ham-fisted, exposition-heavy manner that I wish it hadn’t been included.
Bruce: It's based on a well-reviewed graphic novel, which appears to have dealt with issues such as racism and sudden sexual maturity with a frankness Shyamalan avoided. The source may help explain the unimaginative dialogue, but it doesn't excuse the completely implausible explanation for the tourists' predicament, with plot holes you could drive a hotel shuttle bus through.
Shyamalan seems to think he's making a Hitchcock movie — complete with director cameo — but Old struck me throughout as an extended Twilight Zone episode. At 30 minutes, you can get away with some '50s sci-fi silliness and bizarre conspiracies, but at 105 minutes, you're obligated to reach a better-conceived conclusion and to weave in more-complex themes along the way. Instead, everyone just gets older, dying in a variety of less-than-shocking ways (with one twisted exception that was the only time I smiled in the whole film). In short, it's just sloppy: The children magically gain intellectual maturity, and the provocative topics that apparently interested the graphic novel's author were trimmed out. The filmmaking is inconsistent and often distracting, and the final moments smell of a post-test-screening reshoot. I give it a D.
Edwin: Shyamalan has struggled to “stick the landing” throughout his career, and he seems similarly unsure how to conclude what could be his best cinematic idea yet. He’s also lost when it comes to using the talents of Thomasin McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit) and Alex Wolff (Hereditary), who play Guy’s and Prisca’s rapidly growing kids for much of the film, and clearly require directors with a sense for guiding performances — not exactly Shyamalan’s forte. It’s frustrating to watch these and other actors embarrass themselves, especially in the service of a good movie that feels like it could (and should) have been great. I liked it a lot more than you did, but I’ll still go with a B-minus.
Grade: C. Rated PG-13. Now playing at AMC River Hills 10, Biltmore Grande, and Carolina Cinemark
(Photos: Universal)
