It's nice that we've moved past M. Night Shyamalan as a punchline. Now he's just a reliable filmmaker for a specific kind of horror mysteries. The punchline status was deserved for a while, and he played a part in it. After the success of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable, Shyamalan embraced the "master storyteller" title he'd been given and it led to diminishing returns. Eventually, he bottomed out when he tried to move away from his twist movies with the box office bomb The Last Airbender (and the forgotten, but not that bad, After Earth). That was his low point. Since then, he's built his reputation back up with more straightforward twists, so to speak. The Visit is a horror movie with a twist that's just as scary even if you know the twist. It's nice that Split is a backdoor sequel to Unbreakable, but none of the film's effectiveness comes from that. And Glass barely even has a twist. For years, Shyamalan didn't give himself enough credit, actually. He acted like The Sixth Sense only became a phenomenon because of the twist. The truth is, The Sixth Sense was a sensation because it was a good movie anyway, and the twist brought it to another level. In his latest run of movies, Shyamalan seems aware that people are expecting a twist and focuses on the rest of the movie more.
That's how you get Old. This movie is about a few families on a resort
vacation who are led to a secluded beach by the management. That beach can't be
easily escaped once it's entered and causes people to age about a year every
half hour. So it becomes the ultimate race against the clock as the families
try to escape before their time runs out. There is an explanation to it all,
and the movie does eventually get to that. The highlight of the movie is the
aging though.
The scenes on the beach are weird: sometimes as a style choice, sometimes necessitated by the aging. Aging characters from 6 until middle-age requires a few casting changes. He has to shoot around some characters for a while so he can swap the performers out. It's pretty obvious when he does that, but there isn't another way to do it. There are other touches he just likes to use, like a circular rotation of a camera from the same perspective to highlight the movement and panic. At times, the movie reminded me a lot of mother! with the speed that certain things happened. He invites the movie to move faster than he can keep up with. It's nice for the frenetic pace, although it feels a little like he built in an excuse for sloppiness.
I'm not a big fan of Shyamalan as a horror filmmaker. His brand of horror tends to over-explain. Part of the reason something like The Village is ridiculed now, despite being really good before the twist, is that the twist at the end explains too much. IT makes it all feel silly retroactively. Shyamalan is a magician who likes to show off how clever his illusions are rather than keeping the magic intact. Old leaves very little unexplained. There's an entire final act about cleaning up loose-ends that is too clean. I suppose I understand why Shyamalan would do that. If he leaves anything unresolved, people will assume he's setting up a sequel, but I'd appreciate some more ambiguity.
As director, Shyamalan is the star of the movie, but he does assemble a great cast. Gael Garcia Berna and Vicky Krieps play the lead couple who watch their young children turn into Thomason McKenzie and Alex Wolff. Rufus Sewell is a successful doctor with a trophy wife played by Abbey Lee and a young daughter who grows up to be Eliza Scanlan. Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, and Aaron Pierre are there too. Most of the performances are as good as the situation allows. What was never clear to me though was the mental maturity that went along with the physical aging. How old are the kids mentally? At times, Wolff and Scanlan act like 6-year-olds in adult bodies. Other times, they seem grown up. I think McKenzie is a great actress, but her direction doesn't seem clear at all. I think a one point she has a line about seeing colors to describe puberty...It's weird.
Old is a movie that works better as a trailer than a movie. It must've been very easy movie to sell a studio on it. The pitch is clear and frightening. Filling it out into an entire movie is a lot harder. It isn't very fun for an audience to be so far ahead of the characters the whole time. The movie wavers between being a puzzle and an allegory in ways that aren't very clear. The movie is pretty fun, but it's a reminder of why I have trouble getting into M. Night Shyamalan's films.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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