'Old' Review: A Poorly Executed Yet Creative and Contemplative Thriller
is Shyamalan’s fourteenth film a standout of the genre in the 2021 movie season or yet another blemish on M. Night’s controversial filmography?
The latest horror film from the King-of-Twists himself, M. Night Shyamalan, “Old”, follows a group of tourist families from various backgrounds who find themselves on a secluded private beach while vacationing on a tropical island paradise. They soon discover, however, that this hidden beach has the mysterious ability to age its inhabitants at an incredibly rapid pace that puts all of their lives in danger as they attempt to escape.
The film was both written and directed by Shyamalan, and stars Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, and Thomasin McKenzie.
The immediate draw of this film (as with a lot of Shyamalan’s work) is the intriguing and creative nature of its premise. The movie presents an original and equally frightening concept, that makes the terror that ensues not only physical but existential as well.
The best horror films are those that move away from gore and jump scares and make the audience feel the psychological dread of the situations onscreen sink in, and this film accomplishes that rather well. By having the main characters age rapidly and come to terms with all their wasted time, condensing the last decades of their lives into a few hours, this panic and existential terror projects well onto the audience and makes them reflect on their own mortality.
The messaging of the film (despite being a bit ham-fisted in certain parts due to the nature of the script) about spending your time in life wisely with what counts instead of wasting it, as well as the general uncertainty of how quickly your end will come, hits hard. It also touches on dealing with the aging, decline and deaths of loved ones and parents, which is something everyone can relate to especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
This film can make everyone become more contemplative about their own life after seeing the contemplations occurring onscreen. Death is the ultimate reigning power in existence, and this film shows us how many things in life are ultimately largely unimportant in that context, be it personal quarrels or going too fast to slow down and appreciate the important things. This is seen through the many character interactions that occur onscreen as they reflect on their lives and learn to realize what they should have appreciated all along.
Despite many questionable performances in the film, a standout here is Alex Wolff, who displays his competence and acting skills, especially amongst his characters’ peers. Wolff is a fan favorite actor who really shines apart from everyone else in the film.
The movie, which was filmed in the Dominican Republic, features arguably the most beautiful and most interesting of Shyamalan’s cinematography. The beach location, which is the primary setting for most of the events of the film, provides for a visually-pleasing set piece supplemented by several tropical and luscious bird’s-eye-view shots straight out of a screensaver.
Unfortunately, beyond this is where the film begins to take a serious dip in quality.
Aside from the aforementioned performance by Alex Wolff, most of the other main actors in the movie give mixed performances with very uneven acting throughout. What might be passable acting in one scene by an actor is quickly quashed with a messy inconsistent portrayal in the next.
For the most part, the line delivery of the main actors is quite flat and stale, and their portrayals stiff. One strongly gets the feeling in many scenes that these actors are simply reading lines off of a script without putting any real emotion or effort into their words and expressions. As a result, most of the acting in this film just comes off as cheap, amateurish and corny, which is a hallmark of some of Shyamalan’s lesser films, such as “The Happening” and “The Last Airbender.”
The poor acting is further exacerbated and exaggerated by a mediocre script that provides for some incredibly cringey and on-the-nose dialogue that makes most of the onscreen conversations feel entirely like a staged production and not an immersive, realistic character experience. As previously mentioned, the messaging about aging and time is conveyed more subtly and expertly in some scenes, but in others the restrictive script has characters outright explain the messaging of the film to the audience in their forced dialogue.
Per the script, all of the main characters in this film are written to be largely one-dimensional with minimal development and each given only one predominant character trait with which their entire characterization is marked by for the entire runtime. None of these characters are particularly interesting and none of them are given real substantive reasons to make us invested in their journey and struggles.
Shyamalan is a director known for his masterful twist endings, but the twist ending for this film is one plagued by heavy foreshadowing. While it presents some radically new and shocking information behind the events of the film and places its strange events in a satisfying context, a lot of the elements of the twist seemed to be conveyed rather loudly and obviously earlier on, to which any audience member should be able to piece together most of the finale well before the final reveals.
On top of this, the movie suffers from multiple endings where it keeps raising your expectations that the end has finally been reached, only to continue on and buildup/take down in similar fashion several times. This works to reduce the impact that the twist brings and over-explains when in a case such as this one, less would be more to leave the audience guessing. This takes away what often is the best part of Shyamalan’s films in being blown away by the explosive nature of the final reveals.
“Old” is an original and creative horror film from the mind of M. Night Shyamalan that raises existential stakes and thrills both onscreen and to its audience, while suffering primarily from poor dialogue, one-dimensional main characters, and a prolonged twist that fizzles out its own impact.