There is no twist in Old. There’s a mystery and that mystery later receives an explanation, but if you go into Old looking for a twist simply because it’s the new film from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, you’ll miss what the film is doing as it refuses to even slow down for a moment. In some ways, the direction is Shyamalan at the top of his game with striking shot compositions, some really effective scares for a PG-13 movie, and once again showing that when it comes to directing kids, he’s on the same level as his idol, Steven Spielberg. But in other ways, you can see Shyamalan’s weaknesses shining through as he lets his premise and mystery overwhelm any character development so that most of the cast is reduced to one-dimensional cutouts incapable of real human moments, which leads to some stilted dialogue (there are shades of The Happening here) and unintentional comedy. To Shyamalan’s credit, he has us for pretty much all of Old’s runtime, but once the movie ends, it feels like we were treading shallow water.
Guy (Gael García Bernal), his wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps), and their two young children, 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River), are vacationing at an exclusive resort. There’s some tension between Guy and Prisca that they’re trying to hide from their children as well as an unknown medical ailment, but they all resolve to try and lose themselves in this idyllic location. The management informs the family that there’s an exclusive beach that they only let certain people know about. The family drives out with another family, surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell), his vain wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), and their young daughter Kara. When they arrive on the beach, it seems pleasant enough until a dead body washes up. The group soon discovers that whenever they try to leave, a pressure exerts itself on their minds and causes them to pass out back at the beach. Even worse, everyone in the group discovers that they’re aging at an alarming rate. With their lives ticking away, they must figure out what’s happening and how to escape it.
Old is a movie where once the inciting event hits and the group is at the beach, something is happening about every five minutes. The movie refuses to slow down, which feels like a conscious choice from Shyamalan to pace his film in such a way that you’re in the mindset of the characters. Just as time is speeding along for them, it speeds along for us as an audience. On the one hand, this makes Old immensely entertaining. You feel like you’re pulling at a thread, trying to uncover what exactly is happening to these people and why, which makes it a riveting, bonkers experience, especially when Shyamalan starts making bigger, more outlandish swings that don’t land.
The film’s main problem is that this premise, which leads to a rich thematic idea of how quickly life moves and what we choose to fight and obsess over leads us to lose sight over what’s important, never breathes enough to make us care about any of these people as individuals. They’re pawns in a game, and while the game is fun, it also lacks much depth. You can only care about these people in the broadest possible strokes of, “What would I do in this situation?” rather than anything the script brings to the table, which is a shame because in the film’s opening, you have the opportunity to learn about Guy and his family on a deeper level. That opening twenty minutes is where they feel like real people rather than just subjects for what’s happening on The Weird Time Beach.
Of course, the supernatural has been a recurring element in Shyamalan’s films, but his best movies know how to use that supernatural element to illuminate character and theme. The Sixth Sense isn’t about “Why can this kid see dead people?” or “Isn’t it wild that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?” It’s a movie about mortality, grief, and healing. It’s really a movie about human connection, and the whole supernatural conceit is a way to illustrate that. In Old, the supernatural supersedes the rest of the picture, so nothing else really matters beyond what’s the next crazy thing that’s going to happen. Shyamalan has the directing ability to keep you hooked on those crazy things, but as a screenwriter, he fails to add any depth to why those things should matter. When Charles’ mother dies on the beach early on, it’s simply to illuminate the stakes of how the accelerated aging process will kill the characters. She isn’t grieved. She isn’t a real person. She perishes and is never spoken of again even by her son.
When the film finally does reach its resolution, it feels empty because there’s no catharsis to it. You get an answer, and the answer is satisfactory insofar as it explains how and why everything unfolded, but it doesn’t tell us anything about our characters or their journey. It’s the rare instance where I feel like Shyamalan would have been better served leaving his ending ambiguous and not providing an answer so that the audience would at least have to sit with the themes of time, again, and loss. Instead, the made-up time beach gets a made-up answer, and that’s the end of it.
Old is a good reminder that even when Shyamalan is infuriating, he’s almost always captivating. Even when his screenwriting choices are questionable as they are here, I can’t deny that Old had me hooked even at its silliest, dumbest moments. He’s grown as a director over the last twenty years, and that skill is on display here. Sadly, he has yet to bring it all together to where the scope of his ideas also does justice to the characters who are within that construct. Old isn’t the same old from Shyamalan, but it’s hard to say it’s exactly a new trick either.
Rating: B-
Old opens in theaters on July 23rd.