A thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly reducing their entire lives into a single day.
M. Night Shyamalan’s best work was early on in his career; both “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs” were enjoyable but everything else he has made since, including “Unbreakable,” which was released in between the aforementioned titles, have all been terrible disappointments, with some even going over the edge into sheer preposterousness (that’s right “The Last Airbender” and “After Earth,” I’m looking at you). However, every now and again he manages to redeem himself with a film that feels like his old self (“Split”) but then he turns around and ruins it all by making garbage like “Glass,” “The Happening,” and “The Village.” Mr. Shyamalan is most definitely a mixed bag and his latest effort, the aptly titled “Old,” has to be his worst movie to date. “The Last Airbender” is a masterpiece compared to this tepid, banal, and self-absorbed mitigated disaster.
Shyamalan is obviously going through a mid-life crisis and can’t decide on whether to make a straight-up horror-thriller or a Cassavetes-esque character-driven ensemble piece. He fails miserably, regardless. One of the biggest issues I’ve always had with Shyamalan is that he painted himself into a corner early on in his career and became known as the filmmaker who always has a big twist at the end of every film he makes so in many ways, he pigeon-holed himself and has been unable to escape that label ever since. Instead of just trying to tell a good story, he feels the incessant need to add a huge expository denouement at the conclusion of almost every movie and people have become fatigued with it.
In “Old,” mother and father Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps), along with their two young children Trent and Maddox (Nolan River and Alexa Swinton), arrive at a prestigious luxury island resort far away from civilization. Hoping to relax and take some much-needed R & R, they are informed by the resort manager that there is a private beach that very few people know about and he offers to have them driven to the location so they can enjoy the water by themselves. They are only too happy to accept his offer and shortly thereafter, they find themselves on the beachfront, encompassed by extraneous rocks that surround the mysterious and isolated cove. They are quickly joined by two more families but gradually, everyone on the beach begins to experience strange abnormalities. When the dead body of a woman who tried to swim away from the cove rolls up on the beach, people begin to panic and as they try to escape down the narrow and winding path on which they arrived, they lose consciousness and find themselves back on the sand unable to remember how they got there.
While the adults try to figure out what is happening, they are beyond shocked when their kids quickly grow into young teenagers, and eventually into twenty-somethings. Collectively, they comprehend that the beach is causing them all to grow older, at an alarmingly expeditious rate, and that they have less than one day to resolve what is happening to them and why. In the beginning, one character appears to have the onset of early Alzheimer’s and as time goes by, his condition worsens, forgetting who he is and who his family is. Another character has a tumor growing inside of her but because there is a doctor amongst the group, he is able to cut out what was initially diagnosed as a pea-sized cyst, a growth that ends up being the size of a cantaloupe. Characters try swimming out of the cove but end up inexplicably drowning, while other characters try climbing the jagged rocks, only to fall to their deaths. As each character grows older by the second, they must put their differences aside if they are to try and figure out a way off the beach, before it’s too late.
I have to admit, when I first saw the trailer for “Old,” I was intrigued. Shyamalan has come out of his comfort zone and away from the bustling metropolis that is Philadelphia, where he shot many of his prior films. While the location for “Old” is beautiful and exotic, it is the only element of the movie that is. What Shyamalan does with “Old,” is cram a story that would have been better suited within the confines of a TV series, akin to “Lost,” into an almost two-hour picture, and as a result, rushes each character’s narrative and motives so that he can move onto the next character and so on and so forth. Everything about the movie feels rushed, the acting, the pacing, the direction, the story, and Shyamalan unapologetically takes a page out of the Experimental Film Playbook and inserts abstract and occasional out-of-focus, off-center shots, culminating in the focus (or lack thereof) of various characters’ features; a wide shot that includes the eyes of one character, the mouth of another, and the indistinguishable top of a third person’s head.
“Old” feels like the dawning of a filmmaker who needs to reinvent himself and the type of stories he wants to tell. The thrillers and supernatural tales he directed in the past were a product of their time and don’t particularly hold up well today. With “Old,” Shyamalan is unrelenting in reminding us just how precious time is, how quickly our children grow up, how important it is to care for our elders, issues we are all familiar with but he smashes us over the head repeatedly with a reminder mallet, just in case we forgot, and then has the film’s characters constantly recall the name of the movie by conjuring the word OLD as often and as frequently as possible; “Oh My God! I’m getting OLD!”, “Our children are growing OLDer,” “You have wrinkles (In other words, you’re getting OLD),” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. As I stated earlier, “Old” would have been better suited to a TV show where each episode could focus on individual families or characters and allow proper character growth and exposition, instead, the movie wastes no time in wasting the time and talents of all involved. I think Mr. Shyamalan needs to take a long break and decide how the next chapter of his career should go, if the public is even willing to trust in him again. I’d be willing to give him another chance, but just barely.
“Old” opens in theaters Friday, July 23rd
