“This was supposed to be a Zen trip, man.”
Caught somewhere between an existential meditation on the brevity of life and a creepy thriller, Old is a quintessential M. Night Shyamalan film, showcasing the director’s strengths and weaknesses in equal measure.
There is a “twist” at the end of the film—in quotes because it is foreshadowed quite thoroughly and is more of a transparent and unnecessary framing device than a rug pull—but its premise and the entirety of its plot are simple enough to concisely summarize. Its main narrative is lifted from Sandcastle, a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Lévy that was given to Shyamalan as a Father’s Day gift by his daughter. In the novel, a group of people find themselves trapped on a beach where time is drastically accelerated. One minute they’re relaxing on a tropical vacation, the next they find themselves rapidly aging. Parents check in on their young children after an hour apart and find they have grown into puberty and then adulthood, while the children must come to grips with their intellectual and physical maturation at the same time as they nurse their parents in their old age. Medical conditions worsen and, any time this mysterious natural force claims a fresh victim, flesh and bone are reduced to dust in a matter of hours.
But where the book strives to be cryptic and elusive—a rumination on the meaning of life, death, and free will—Shyamalan’s film is less interested in reflecting on profound matters than in using the premise for unsettling plot developments and brief flashes of PG-13 body horror. (How do you remove a tumor when flesh wounds heal in seconds? What happens if you get blood poisoning? What if a bone breaks clean and immediately heals back crooked?)
Shyamalan’s screenplay, which takes several creative liberties, opens with Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca Cappa (Vicky Krieps) traveling to a luxury resort with their two children, Maddox (Thomasin McKenzie1) and Trent (Alex Wolff). No sooner have they settled into their vacation routine than the resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) has offered them an exclusive trip to a private beach that’s separated from the main compound. Several other tourist families join them, including Charles (Rufus Sewell), his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), their daughter Kara (Eliza Scanlen), and his mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant); and married couple Jarin (Ken Lueng) and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird). When they arrive at the beach, they find a hilariously-named rapper, Mid-sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), already there.
If that bloated list of actor names is a chore to read through, that’s because Shyamalan needs a lot of bodies on hand to sacrifice to his mysterious beach, which functions similarly to the supernatural outcropping in Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock. This is where Shyamalan is in top form. Setting his camera on the surface of the ocean and letting waves lap up onto the lens when someone faints, as if a malicious presence is peeking out from the water in first person point-of-view; smoothly panning then doubling back as characters rapidly age off screen; setting his camera within the decomposing skeleton of a woman who only recently perished; symbolically using sped up footage of children; blurring a shot to indicate blindness. The most extreme example of Shyamalan’s prowess is a mobile long take that weaves through the entire main cast and sees Kara go from several months pregnant to giving birth within a matter of minutes. There are a few instances where the camera tricks prove more superficial distractions than organic storytelling tools—too self-consciously clever—but on balance I think he comes out ahead. Cinematography was handled by Mike Gioulakis, who has worked with Shyamalan several times in the past.
For better or worse, once the inciting event occurs, Old moves at such a pace that any chance of developing real characters is squandered. Though the perfunctory dialogue serves to adequately describe family dynamics in the early scenes, there simply isn’t enough substance to the characters for the audience to have any emotional stakes when trial befalls them. This stems from Shyamalan’s writing style, which favors a kind of bluntness that precludes deeper meanings. At certain points, it walks the same line as The Happening, where you’re not quite sure if it is subpar writing or deadpan parody of its genre.
Thankfully, the relentless pace ensures that Old will grip the viewer for its duration despite its evident shortcomings. Without a chance to calm down and assess the situation—which dovetails quite neatly with the theme and puts us in the mindframe of the characters—we remain engaged with the unfolding mystery, barely able to contemplate what’s happened before the screenplay throws another haymaker at us. This is fun while it lasts, but it is so in-the-moment, that in the aftermath we’re left with too little. It skimped out on examining its rich themes in exchange for a thrilling rush.
Finding a middle ground could have worked wonders here. Consider Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, which many cite as his pinnacle as a filmmaker. It isn’t about its supernatural elements so much as it is about grief, morality, fear, human connection. But the supernatural is foregrounded in Old. The characters are pawns in a fun game, sure, but they are not a conduit for exploring deeper material. Take, for instance, Charles’ mother Agnes, who dies quite early in the picture. Her death is not a cause for mourning but merely an illustration of the mysterious powers at work on the beach. She’s promptly forgotten and never mentioned again.
And yet, despite these deficiencies, Shyamalan effortlessly keeps us hooked with his breakneck style and immersive camera. He may have missed an opportunity to really dig into thematic ground that he has explored before with slightly different tools, but one cannot deny that he knows how to keep an audience engaged with purely surface level thrills.
1. All of the characters who begin the film as children—save Idlib (Kailen Jude), who does not travel to the beach—are portrayed by three different actors. Maddox is also played by Embeth Davidtz and Alexa Swinton; Trent is portrayed by Emun Elliott and Luca Faustino Rodriguez; and Kylie Begle and Mikaya Fisher have turns as Kara.