Film Review: Old (2021)
---(Spoilers)--- a bit of a flop, but still a piece of the puzzle that is M. Night Shyamalan's film choices. Old is a hate-worthy non-starter, and I promise you'll have nothing to say once it's over.
BIO FROM IMDB: A vacationing family discovers that the secluded beach where they're relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day.
Old is captivating, at times even thrilling. The mystery and suspense are what we have come to expect from Shyamalan, but I ultimately found this film hard to care about. Old gets old before it’s over.
The heavy subject matter behind the plot is not given due respect, and the result feels like a modern Twilight Zone episode or some 1970s B-movie.
If you are a huge M. Night fan, this review might annoy you. Old isn’t for people who like being critical with films; critiquing this will feel like beating a dying animal.
Just to clarify, it should be noted that Shyamalan puts out different kinds of films—two different types to be exact; you either see an M. Night flick that is attempted-meta, or it is a part of the Unbreakable (2000) series.
I won’t be going in deep with the Unbreakable universe, mostly because I haven’t seen Glass (2019). Split (2016) was good, and possibly a review of this film series in the future will lift some of the stains from my opinion of Shyamalan’s career.
His “meta” films are flop central, and unfortunately Old will be joining them.
The best way to frame my critique is with a light summary of Shyamalan’s films, focusing specifically on how bad the misses were and why that matters. I’ll then apply it to Old, giving that film the same evaluation as a typical “meta” film from M. Night while also articulating why I think he feels so safe delivering unfinished movies.
Shyamalan made his name in film with suspense, plot twists, and atmosphere, but from his first films you can sense the personal exploration taking place through the art.
Praying With Anger (1992) is deeply personal (his writer-director debut), and Wide Awake (1998) also see’s the director working with ideas of loss and closure.
My introduction to M. Night came through The Village (2004), a classic but not perfect film that really delivered the signature Shyamalan mystique alongside a strong performance from the cast.
Of course, the world’s introduction to M. Night’s style came with The Sixth Sense (1999). We see within these films a few common themes: the child looking for belonging, the varied themes around loss, and of course the unexpected plot twist.
While Signs (2002) and Lady in the Water (2006) are notoriously mid, my friend pointed out to me that latter film was marketed incorrectly as classic popcorn-horror film. Audiences were not interested in the all-atmosphere art film that Shyamalan gave them, and I think the same fate will befall Old for different reasons.
The three films after Lady in the Water—The Happening (2008), The Last Airbender (2010), and After Earth (2013)— represent what I consider to be Shyamalan’s worst films.
A key factor has to have been the negative reception to The Happening, which was loud and wide-spread. M. Night’s decision to follow-up with the disaster that was The Last Airbender sealed the deal, and After Earth buried he coffin.
The marketing campaign for Old played on all the classic “M. Night-isms” that bring the dedicated fans out. The trailers offered a film about a beach that makes people age quickly, and that’s exactly all we got in the end.
This is exactly the same problem from Lady in the Water, only instead of misrepresentation we are deceived into thinking what lies in store is more than what is in the trailer.
The parents of Old, played by Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) and Gael Garcia Bernal (Mozart in the Jungle) respectively, have lucked upon this free trip to the tropics. The classic Shyamalan kids, the youngest actors seemingly plucked from The Visit (2015), are done well-enough in the beginning.
The children’s dialogue, until they arrive at the beach, is very authentic. The rest of the writing, however, falls within the typical “Shyamalan characters acting like everything is normal when we know it is not” realm. The dialogue on the beach loses something as the film turns incredible visceral, away from the previous duplicitous vibe of the resort. This aids the atmosphere, but totally tanks the plot.
The other characters are undeveloped, a WASP doctor on holiday with his aging mother, trophy wife, and young daughter. Also, some rapper is there to be accused by the WASP of murder. It all feels very “not the central focus of the film”, and so is underdeveloped.
The childless couple that completes the triad of families on the beach, played exceedingly-well by Nikki Amuka-Bird (Jupiter Ascending) and Ken Leung (Lost, The Sopranos), are similarly undeveloped throughout the narrative.
Let me be clear, the acting performances in this were genuinely good in that viscerally captivating way. I did like the interchange of players as the younger characters aged-up.
The whole narrative mechanism of the beach that ages you is good, and is executed fairly-well. The problem for me is just that film replicates the mechanism and nothing more.
This film was based on a graphic novel called Sandcastle, which I haven’t read. My concern is that he maybe added literally nothing new to the original concept, and as a result the adaptation is a failure.
My thinking is Shyamalan had this idea to recreate this graphic novel that resonated with him. Ultimately, he had to come to the conclusion that the idea was not his. I think there might be a point here where M. Night had to “make it his own” in some way, and the next thing you know he was the damned van driver.
Shyamalan cannot help but overdo it by including himself so heavily in his films.
Whereas Tarantino can actually play a shitty dirt-bag and Hitchcock was always subtle, Shyamalan cannot help putting himself in a high-profile cameos; cameos that take you out of it.
Old takes me out of the narrative too far. What he may see as an artistic interjection of himself into the narrative of his art, is only cool to him.
I say this with as much respect for personal artistic expression as I can, but at a point you need to step back and consider the art critically.
Old is a failure not because it is outwardly bad or poorly made, but because it fails to deliver anything remotely satisfying in regard to the heavy themes at work. Some might push back on this.
I think if those concepts mattered in the long-run, they would have been articulated in a less-gimmicky way. The reveal of the kids growing older, mixed with all the adults beginning to feel it themselves, does build to a good reveal.
My problem really comes after this, when the film moves to a majority-visceral atmosphere and all dialogue is reduced to either A) reacting to people dying/getting old or B) troubled nostalgia about how crazy/unfair it is.
‘But, Devon, that adds makes it cool because that can be how sudden tragedy strikes you down when you get old!’ Okay, that may be true but millions of people live with these problems and are not old, so I feel like that cannot hold-up.
Perhaps Shyamalan should have focused more on resolving the plot in the midst of the beach rather than focusing on the beach destroying everyone with their problems floating by in the background, unimportant.
Old fails to do the theme of age justice. While Shyamalan, as a skilled director, knows how to pick good performers to deliver his atmosphere and suspense, he doesn’t understand how to remove himself for the good of the story’s integrity. He knows how to cut a film in the editing room to move like an M. Night flick, but he fails to see how doing the bare minimum with such high-stakes topics in the story can lead to crossed-wires for the end product.
The bottom line is that he either is afraid to over-develop and so doesn’t, or he considers how much effort has gone in to be “enough”. I guess he is the successful filmmaker, but the flops speak for themselves.
Old gets visceral, but the story collapses as a result and the film ends so horribly that it is impossible to think they didn’t just “wrap it up”; possibly another problem with adapting media to a different medium.
I rate Old 2/5 stars. If Shyamalan was trying to articulate the fragility of life and “how quickly it all goes by”, he should have focused less on landing the gimmick and more on having the characters legitimize the gimmick. The cinematography is top notch—what you expect from “industry professionals”.
Maybe M. Night is too comfortable with knowing the visual will always come through, but he needs to make sure these stories work if he wants the films to be good or even re-watchable.