Film Review: Old
M. Night Shyamalan belly-flops with the stilted, silly Old
M. Night Shyamalan revisits the stylings of The Happening with his rapid-aging horror thriller, Old. A labored reach for existential poignancy undone by an absurd, awkward, and alien script, Shyamalan’s latest is a far cry from the halcyon days of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and The Village. Even with some great horror beats, your mileage will depend entirely on just how much you can stomach Shyamalan’s particular brand of unironically stilted messes. Minor spoilers ahead…
There’s nothing quite like the rollercoaster career of M. Night Shyamalan. A wunderkind auteur whose career launched with a dazzling potency - it would be hard for anyone to ever replicate the consecutive punches of The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, and The Village - Shyamalan was the defining storyteller of the early-aughts. But no artist is complete without a flop era. With the widely panned and self-congratulatory Lady in the Water and a series of ego-driven documentaries - The Buried Secret of M. Night Shyamalan and The Man Who Heard Voices - the director’s acclaim soon soured into derision and backlash. From 2008’s The Happening all the way to 2013’s After Earth, Shyamalan would spend more than half a decade churning out schlocky duds, with the disastrous mega-budget bomb The Last Airbender as a centerpiece. But a funny thing happened during the last few years: The filmmaker who was once touted as “the next Spielberg” would reinvent himself as a craftsman of elevated B-movies. From The Visit to Split and its ambitiously hamstrung followup, Glass, Shyamalan would combine the most entertaining aspects of his failures with his signature high-concepts to a renewed verve.
An extrapolation of the graphic novel Sandcastle, penned by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old comes off the back end of Shyamalan’s second renaissance, but it feels straight out of his flop era. Existential horror told through baffling dialogue, stilted exposition, and an underwhelming reveal, Old isn’t The Visit or Split, it’s The Happening all over again. Centered around the Capas - Guy (Gael García Bernal), Prisca (Vicky Krieps), and their children, 11-year-old Maddox (Mikayla Fisher) and six-year-old Trent (Nolan River) - the film finds our family on a beach getaway that houses an alarming space-time anomaly: anyone who vacations there ages rapidly. But Old never lives up to its fascinating gimmick; instead, it’s content with barely filling out its 108-minute runtime, mining menial tension out of squabbles, undercooked set pieces, and the occasional scare.
“Existential horror told through baffling dialogue, stilted exposition, and an underwhelming reveal, Old isn’t The Visit or Split, it’s The Happening all over again.”
Dialogue has never been M. Night Shyamalan’s forte. Even with his strongest features - here’s looking at you, “I see dead people” and “Swing away, Merrell” - lines spoken by Shyamalan characters are typically carried by the crescendo of the moment or the strength of a performance. With Old, deliveries range from robotically on-the-nose to bafflingly alien. From Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie, who play the rapid-aged Capa children, to Eliza Scanlen, Rufus Sewell, and Ken Leung, there’s no shortage of talent within the canyons of Old, but when everyone is so obviously overqualified for the wildly overwritten script, it’s no wonder the film fumbles its robotic or weird dialogue with astonishing consistency. “You’re always thinking about the future!” Prisca lashes out at Guy at one point. “And you’re always thinking of the past! You work in a goddamn museum!” he retorts. Cue pained groans from the theater audience. Later on, one from the group observes: “Something is going on with time on this beach!” Gee, thanks.
Old is ripe with potential and existential dread, clearly meant to be a “live in the moment” morality tale. Shyamalan is eager to meditate on the fact that everyone will eventually be swallowed by the sands of time, but for most of the film’s long, 108 minutes, he’s distracted by the petty arguments he manufactures for his stock characters: There’s the exposition-dumping nurse (Leung) and his epileptic wife (Nikki Amuka-Bird); the surgeon (Rufus Sewell), his vapid trophy wife (Abbey Lee), and daughter (Eliza Scanlen); and a famous rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre, who even says his character’s name out loud without a trace of irony). There are accusations tinged with racism, confused yelling, and futile attempts to escape the deadly time-warp, but for the most part, Old skates upon the surface of its deeper themes and its horrors. For parents, watching the years peel off your children like water through a sieve is heartbreaking, but the film barely does anything to pull on this raw, emotional thread.
“…for the most part, Old skates upon the surface of its deeper themes and its horrors. “
But all is not lost; if we’re speaking of Old’s strengths, it proves that Shyamalan is still the master of the scare and a technical wizard. Re-teaming with Split and Glass cinematographer Mike Gioulakis (It Follows, Under the Silver Lake), the director shoots through a lens befitting of its sun-dappled nightmare. I reckon that many will bristle against Old’s seemingly haphazard camerawork, but there’s wisdom in its awkward blocking and disorienting movements, even giving us moments where you have to ask: “How did they get that shot?” Old’s deliberately furtive framings only bolster its horror beats - even if they’re too few and far between - and invoke the page-flipping stingers of Junji Ito: We see the vacant shock on the characters’ faces long before we see the horror they’re reacting to, and it’s mighty effective. But the fact remains that Old is a fairly sanitized chiller; bloodless and at times toothless, there are plenty of terrifying moments involving bodies, but calling it “body horror” would be a misnomer. This is a film that would have greatly benefitted from a bumped-up R-rating.
M. Night Shyamalan is undoubtedly a divisive filmmaker, but there is one thing he is not: boring. Even with his biggest, most raucous failures, he swings for the fences with big concepts and grand statements; Old is no different. It even tacks on a signature “reveal,” a clunker of an added layer that can’t be counted as a “twist,” but its ham-fisted attempt at social commentary, snatched out of thin air, is as silly as it gets. Almost nothing about Old works, but like most of Shyamalan’s flops, it falls apart in the most magnificent way, and the mileage you get will depend entirely on your willpower and your company at the theater.
