So highly ambitious, so incredibly flawed, but oh so engrossing is M. Night Shyamalan’s (Signs, The Sixth Sense) return to form his latest mind-**** Old. Suppose you’re new to Shyamalan (which I would understand if you are a bit younger and have avoided all of his critical flops since 2002’s Signs, Old might be the coolest thing you’ve ever seen. For the rest of us, we know that somewhere in the film will have a twist. It’s a matter of either trying to figure it out (which is something we inherently do now) or trying to enjoy the ride. I attempted to do both. I succeeded in enjoying the ride. I did not figure out the twist. There’s also the idea that Shyamalan might try to do one of these types of movies without a twist so that it also can be something that plays in your mind. All in all, I was able to set aside all of the many, many imperfections associated with Old and appreciate it for what it was worth and then some.
Did I mention this movie was full of deficiencies? While I shouldn’t mention these first, I half to. My biggest complaint with Shyamalan is that he needs to prove he is the most intelligent person in the room. He struck gold three times in four years with The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs, movies he directed and wrote. But as he continued to advance his career, his films slowly began to get worse. The Village I thought was great, but I was in the minority (43% and 57% on Rotten Tomatoes). But things got remarkably worse with the awful Lady in the Water, The Happening (which I liked, but nobody else did), Devil, The Last Airbender, and After Earth. He rebounded with The Visit (68%, 51%), which I did not enjoy before hitting again with Split and falling with its follow-up Glass. With Old, he returns to what made me fall in love with his movies and had me anticipate many of his following disappointments, a little bit more with the bad without giving anything away. The dialogue was horrendous, the acting was not good, and many prop placements were unnatural but needed for the storytelling. Everything required to advance the story was conveniently right there at the right time.
The story revolves around four groups of strangers who end up on a secluded island located a short drive from a resort they are all vacationing at in an unnamed (I think) tropical location. Promised by the resort manager who invites each of our groups specifically, the views of this infrequently viewed tropical paradise will have more than enough room to be alone from the mass of vacationers frequenting the more popular beaches. It’s almost a no-brainer for each of the selected invites.
Our main players are Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal –The Motorcycle Diaries, Babel), who is a statistician by trade, his wife, Prisca (Vicky Krieps – Phantom Thread, A Most Wanted Man), who is a museum curator by trade, and their children (11-year-old daughter Kara and six-year-old son Maddox). Guy and Prisca’s relationship is rocky, and this trip promises to be one last time the foursome will be together as a family. Prisca is planning to leave Guy as she attempts to deal with an advancing tumor destined to shorten her life. Unfortunately, our characters are all extremely one-dimensional. That is certainly okay for what this movie needs to be, but Shyamalan either force-feeds us so much that we don’t need it or could have quickly figured it out ourselves.
Idlib is the resort manager’s nephew. An affable six-year-old child with a fondness for walking up to strangers and saying, “Name and occupation, please?” He and Maddox form an instant friendship. There is something we instantly like about Idlib, but we can sense some innate fear in him simply by watching his eyes. Unfortunately, this young kid isn’t on our screens long enough to truly get to know him. But like everything with Shyamalan, everything he does is purposeful.
The family is driven to the secluded beach along with another family that consists of a successful doctor named Charles (Rufus Sewell – Dark City, A Knight’s Tale), his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee – Mad Max: Fury Road, The Dark Tower), young daughter Kara (Kyle Bailey), and his mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant – Kinsey, Duplicity). There is something not quite right with Charles, though we don’t instantly know what that is. It will play out over time, but he seems as steady and reliable as any character we’ve met. Chrystal is a different story. Some 25 years younger than Charles and utterly obsessed with her physical appearance, Chrystal is the definition of a trophy wife. At best, she’s high-maintenance. At worst, she’s a bit of a bitch. She also suffers from low calcium levels and is highly conscious of her diet as a result.
When they arrive at the secluded beach, we meet three other players. First, there is famous rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre (Amazon Prime’s The Underground Railroad), who is going through some physical and emotional issues himself. He is our only character on the beach when the hotel arrives and drops off the eight guests. Jarin (Ken Leung – ABC’s Lost, Inside Man) and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird – The Laundromat, A Private War) are coming shortly after. We meet the married couple on the resort when Patricia, a psychologist who also suffers from epileptic seizures, is treated by Charles. Jarin introduces himself to Charles as a nurse.
On the beach, our characters slowly realize something isn’t quite right. A string of peculiar events leads our characters to discover what we know going in (simply from the incessant television trailer I must have seen 25-40 times). And that is that everyone on the beach ages one year of their lives every 30 minutes. Once that is discovered, plenty of pandemonium ensues as characters frantically try to figure out what and why this is happening and how it can be stopped.
Why not leave the beach? What will happen to them if they can’t get this advanced aging to stop? How does each character not go completely mad? These questions and more will be answered as Shyamalan’s story unveils itself. His story could be more straightforward, and you do have to suspend all belief. Do that, and you’ll enjoy the movie. Pick apart everything, and you won’t. This is a fantasy-type movie; if you can roll with that, you will have an enjoyable experience. You’ll be frustrated if you get stuck on the poor acting, terrible dialogue, character inconsistencies, etc. Don’t allow yourself to be frustrated. Go with the unique story. It’s a bold effort by
Shyamalan would have done better with actors that you had never seen on film another time in your life. Most everyone will recognize Garcia Bernal and Sewell, and likely Leung. We needed complete unknowns in this movie. It’s different than the acting did this movie any justice. So if we are going to have terrible acting with terrible dialogue, why not do that with people we can recognize as unique characters rather than actors from other movies?
Something else interesting about Old was its time of release. It opened on July 23, 2021, roughly 16 months since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The push to return to the movie theaters hadn’t started until late May 2021. A few movies were released when the pandemic was raging, but the releases of big-budget movies that had been delayed for a year or more (A Quiet Place Part II, Black Widow, F9: The Fast Saga, Cruella, etc.). Each of these movies will have earned more than $100 million domestically. This is great but different from the original projection for each. I’ve seen a dozen or more movies in the theater since the pandemic started. Old felt a little different than those other films, however.
Plot 7.5/10
Character Development 5/10
Character Chemistry 5/10
Acting 5/10
Screenplay 6/10
Directing 8.5/10
Cinematography 8.5/10
Sound 9.5/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 7/10 (maybe we are all just lab rats…)
72%
This score is much lower than my enjoyment of the film. It was severely flawed, but that didn’t mean I did not love the ride.
*** Spoilers and Questions ***
A characteristic of a good movie is it leaves you thinking about it and asking questions long after it is over. That is the case with Old. And there were dozens of things that happened and things that caused you to question or roll your eyes. Some of these are thought-provoking. Some are just preposterous, and you’ll drive yourself crazy if you try to put rational thought behind them.
The clues were awesome. While the experience wouldn’t be the same (as it wouldn’t be the same in any of Shyamalan’s other movies), it would be fun to go back and watch to catch even more of the clues that were missed. The man is a genius when it comes to this. Watching it to figure out what is a clue and what isn’t a clue might be worth the price of admission alone.
I don’t think this film would translate at home. It would be best to see it on the largest screen possible, with the fewest distractions. The joy is taking it all in, and any slight detraction will likely be magnified.
- I thought this was the same story as The Village in so many ways. Had you not seen The Villiage before Old, you would have enjoyed Old even more.
- How did the medical research facility survive 70+ studies, with (we can guess) about 10-15 people dying in each one? How did no one become wiser? How did not even one employee leave and tell the public what was happening throughout this organization? This one, you can’t rationalize.
- Related….if you will have four different groups being tested in this study, but having 12 people having to die because of it, couldn’t you at least get some more afflictions than just the four to examine during this day?
- Why did innocent people have to die? Ok, I understand that you need to get these test cases onto the beach, and maybe a significant other is required. But why the kids? Why the old lady? The dog, to an extent, made sense. Even if a group of people could wrap their heads around these experiments, no one would agree for innocent kids who have nothing to do with any of the tests to be innocent victims.
- Why was all the food needed? It seems that you either need enough food for one day or 50 years. Instead, it looked like they had enough food for a week or two, making zero sense. It is explained that it’s needed for the growth spurts of the three kids. Um…okay?
- Why must we see the hotel van driver spying with his binoculars? Wouldn’t just those random lights peering into the sky be enough to intrigue? Did knowing that they were being watched needed to advance the plot?
- While we knew about each character’s profession through Idlib’s clever way of introducing himself to people on the guests, their professions were constantly beaten down our throats. In all the reviews and spoilers I read, not once did I read that a doctor and a nurse were two of the people selected so that they could be there when events happened that called for people in their skilled professions to be present.
- The coral was okay. The code left by Idlib was kind of neat. It’s something I should have foreseen as a clue, but I missed it. I don’t know if Maddox and Trent gleefully building sandcastles before the coral randomly gets brought up made the most sense.
- It was also interesting that Maddox’s clothing got caught in the coral to keep the duo from surfacing when they should have, though you would have thought that the guy in the binoculars might have waited a bit longer before calling it a day.
- Speaking of the coral, okay, so they stopped aging. But how did they get off the beach after that? The coral didn’t transport them back to safety. Wouldn’t leaving the coral force them to begin aging again? Even if it didn’t, would they be willing to risk it? How long would they need to be in coral before realizing the accelerated aging process had stopped? If they knew the coral was their protection, wouldn’t they have eventually died from thirst anyway?
Movies You Might Like If You Liked This Movie
- Signs
- Annihilation
- The Mist
- 1408
- Shutter Island