Old | Film Review

Age is a funny thing. Some say we get wiser as we get older, some say we get senile, some scream things like “Get off my lawn” or “You crazy kids”, and others say a person is past their prime. That last one may apply to M. Night Shyamalan, the writer and director of his latest installment Old, adapted for the big screen from the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters.

Old takes the viewers on a journey to a beautiful secluded resort with magnificent beaches and fantastic drinks, tailor-made especially for the individual consuming them. Each guest is greeted by a pleasant resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) who gives them a tour of the facility. Our first guests are the Kappa family; Guy (Gael García Bernal), and his wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps) bring their two children Trent and Maddox to the resort as a last hurrah for their family as Guy and Prisca are planning to separate. Prisca also has a tumor. Other resort guests include Doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell), his trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), seizure-afflicted Patricia (Nikki Asuka-Bird) and her husband Jarin (Lost’s Ken Leung).

These group of guests are chosen for a unique reason to be transported to a secluded secret beach that the resort owns for one day. Continuing with his cameos in every movie, M. Night takes on an expanded role as the resort bus driver that transports our guests to the beach. They setup their three camps, soak in some sun, play in the water and then find a dead body in the water. What happens next could determine the fate of all of our guests before the day runs out. This beach ages you… rapidly.

Old spends almost 20 minutes introducing us to the guests and the resort before any action on the beach even takes place. The next hour are gimmicks on how people become old as the day progresses, and the last 20 minutes, let’s just say you may die yourself before you even get to the payoff. Slow plodding story points are presented and then stitched together with some pretty poor dialogue. The movie tries to play up a big new way to age, without any actual suspense or payoff. Rufus Sewell (The Man in the High Castle) is the only one of this cast who seems to be giving the production his all. Vicky Krieps, every time she spoke reminded me of Tommy Wiseau from The Room. Ken Leung is doing his best impression of Miles from LOST rather than a new character, and the rest look like they just came off a stage after an acting workshop.

I would say that the majority of the bad acting falls on the dialogue itself, which resides solely with M. Night. Lines like “I’m not pregnant, just a little fat!” arrive so often, it is no wonder it feels like Tommy Wiseau actually wrote this movie. At one point I turned to my wife and said “You’re killing me, Lisa!”, and she said that she was about to say the same thing. When the kids, Trent (Alex Wolf) and Maddox (Thomasin McKenzie), are mid teens, their dialogue switches from things a 6-year-old would say, which is accurate cause they are 6, to things a teenager says. If they would have been 6-year-olds the entire time, maybe the performance and the story would have been more believable. That will forever remain to be seen.

Yet, there are a few positives. The camera work actually does a really good job of giving the perspective of what the characters are going through using a neat focus trick to showcase blindness, while also combining the camera work with the use of sound to simulate hearing loss. The other sound mixing elements of the beach add distance and space, and it pays off in a big way.

The music scores by Trevor Gureckis are on point and blankets you with a sense of dread and hopelessness. The “M. Night twist” ending isn’t a great payoff, but the movie does leave you asking a pretty heavy philosophical question, which typically for me is the sign of at least a watchable flick. Sadly, these cool concepts are lost on the poor story and script.

Going to a secluded beach won’t cure your problems and illnesses. Nor will going to see this latest offering from M. Night Shyamalan. In fact, I challenge you to watch The Happening again because you might actually like it after this headache-inducing time suck. Why The Happening? Because Lady in the Water is a masterpiece that will never make you feel this old by the end of it.

Old opens in theaters nationwide on July 24, 2021
Starring Gale García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, and Ken Leung
Screenplay M. Night Shymalan
Directed by M. Night Shymalan