Old (2021)
Life’s a Beach (And Other Clichés)
Friend and fellow critic Don Shanahan has a strict “no trailers” policy. He prefers engaging the moviegoing experience with as blank a slate as possible—despite the ever-invasive pop culture info-squids’ best efforts.
My brain, in contrast, needs to be better armed, mostly to determine if a movie looks like a “rush-right-out” affair or more of a “put a pin in it” type deal.
Whoever cut the trailers for M. Night Shyamalan’s Old punished me for my curiosity. Seriously, if you’ve watched the nearly three-minute preview, and have even a passing familiarity with the TV series Lost and the “Kick the Can” episode of The Twilight Zone, there’s absolutely no reason to waste your time here.
On the flip-side, if you pull a Shanahan and wander into this film by happenstance, you may come out of it furious that nobody warned you about the figurative safe plummeting toward your literal head. So consider this my good deed for the day.
Old opens with the Capa family settling into a luxurious resort named “Anamika”—which translates roughly to “without a name”.
Cute.
Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) don’t think their young children, Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River), notice how beyond repair their marriage is, and will do just about anything to keep up appearances. When the hotel manager offers the clan a day-trip to a private beach, they accept—only to find that other guests have been extended the same “exclusive” opportunity.
After being dropped off near a jungle passage that leads through a creepy, winding cave and out onto a gorgeous oceanfront getaway, the Capas take stock of their companions. There’s a doctor vacationing with his elderly mother, his trophy wife, and their toddler daughter; a nurse and his wife, who, I think is some kind of counselor (I’ve completely forgotten); and a rapper who goes by the stage name Mid-Sized Sedan.
The group begins to notice subtle changes within its ranks. The kids’ voices change and swimwear grows uncomfortable. One character, it is revealed, has a tumor whose size has grown exponentially since walking onto the beach. Yep, there’s something funny about time at Anamika, and you’ve probably seen many of the aging gags splashed across your TV screen, phone, or tablet during the Old marketing blitz. Beyond wrinkles and bad eyesight, absolutely everything accelerates, from birth to blood disorders.
And I can’t believe how badly Shyamalan fucked it up.
Actually, I can. There’s a reason that the former wunderkind creator of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable was sent to movie jail following a string of stinkers like Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender. He did some fine community service in producing the not-too-shabby Devil and sneakily sequelizing Unbreakable with Split. But between the execrable Glass and this unforgivably fumbled dud, my guess is he’ll be breaking rocks at Lionsgate before the next COVID variant strikes.
The problem is that Old is a perfect Twilight Zone concept and an imperfect feature-length thriller. At twenty-five minutes, Shyamalan could’ve gotten in and out of the characters, their maladies, and the mystery of Anamika. At an hour-and-forty-eight minutes, he meanders into bone-headed social commentary (of course the old, white doctor antagonizes the young, black rapper); lays on seventeen-too-many knowing lines about the fleeting nature of time (“I can’t wait to hear your voice when you’re older”, “Stop wishing away the time”, “You’re always thinking about the future. It makes me feel unseen!”); and runs out of ways to film his characters and lavish setting within the first half-hour.
Seriously, the camerawork in this movie is something to behold.* Between the dozen or so circling-the-cast-who-are-standing-in-a-circle shots and the puzzling sweeps past the action that are, I guess, meant to disguise some of the non-PG-13 violence, watching Old feels less like seeing a movie and more like watching a reality show in which a camera crew must escape an island of posh lunatics.
A limited run-time might also have prevented Shyamalan from stepping all over his chilling and quite clever third-act revelation.
Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it here.
I’ll just say that instead of making a bold choice with two main characters and risking a seriously dark ending that could have made Old an all-time classic Statement Movie (if one could forget ninety percent of the preceding silliness, that is), Shyamalan tacks on a rushed, illogical coda that demonstrates a lack of confidence on someone’s part—be it himself, a team of studio execs, or a test audience who doesn’t have any idea how shadowy organizations actually work (in real life or in the movies).
A little studio- or self-imposed restraint might have also given the writer/director time to explore his themes through actual characters, rather than settling for archetypal mannequins who act and feel transported out of a mid-90s disaster movie. Only Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff (playing older versions of Maddox and Trent, respectively) are given real room to play, as children whose psyches and emotions are slow to catch up with their physical metamorphoses.
The rest of the adult cast ranges between stock characters who make stupid decisions and actors whose accents create a barrier to evaluating their actual talents as performers—while also being saddled with playing stock characters who make stupid decisions.
This brings me back to “Kick the Can”. For a master class in emotion, wit, whimsy, and inter-generational resonance, watch how Steven Spielberg (in his Twilight Zone: The Movie adaptation of the TV episode) handled a story about a retirement home whose residents get a second chance at childhood. Shyamalan tiptoes around some big ideas in Old, but has absolutely no idea what to do with them, except cram everything into a mystery box and hide behind an “elevated horror” conceit that everyone who knows better hates.
During those blissfully quiet Movie Jail years, I’d hoped that M. Night Shyamalan might have learned some humility, sharpened his storytelling skills, and re-emerged with fresh ideas that could push him beyond just being the “twist” guy.
Sadly, I may just have to accept that his career, like the rusty personal effects of Anamika’s previous inhabitants, has drifted, decayed, and washed up on a barren, anonymous death beach.
Note: It’s fair to point out that M. Night Shyamalan didn’t come up with the story for Old. The film is credited as being based on Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters’ 2011 graphic novel, Sandcastle. I haven’t read the source material, but if Shyamalan’s involvement was at all similar to what happened between the wonderful Avatar TV series and the tragic big-screen “adaptation” of The Last Airbender, it would be equally as fair to lay blame at the filmmaker’s feet.
*In the fall, on YouTube, when someone inevitably puts together a “Stupid Camera Stuff in M. Night’s OLD” supercut.
