M. Night Shyamalan's Old

 

Gillipedia Official Rating: With this movie’s logic, you’ll age 6 months reading this review. Hope it’s worth it.

Score: 7/10

          Old is fun. I do have some gripes that I’ll get into, but this is a bit of a return to form for M. Night Shyamalan with one of the most unique premises in recent memory. 2 sets of families take a vacation at a resort. When they wind up on a beach off the beaten path, it doesn’t take long before our characters start acting strange and they realize that this beach is rapidly aging them. They will desperately try different methods unsuccessfully to escape as they race against the clock to get off the beach and figure out why this is happening.

          There’s a couple of recognizable actors and actresses without any standout performances, and that works well enough as the focus is on the character backgrounds and how that plays into the overarching narrative. Shyamalan famously inserts himself into his movies, and he gives himself one of the more important roles of the movie—which I think was a bit too distracting. To give you a sense of how quickly the characters are aging, each family has young children, and you can expect to see different actors and actresses come in to represent the aging children.

          One of the biggest focuses of the story is trying to predict how the audience will discredit the film. What I mean by this are the different thoughts we’ll all have. “Can they walk back through the cliffside valley they came in from? How far out from civilization are they if they swim?” These are the earliest questions you’ll think of and unsurprisingly are the first aspects to be addressed by the film. As the characters start showing the affects of aging, the questions become more in-depth. “Well, wouldn’t they need lots of sustenance if their bodies are aging? Are their minds aging, or is it just their bodies?” As you think more philosophically, the film begins to show a couple of cracks or provide 1-2 sentences of dialogue to quickly explain something away. Probably the biggest thing I’ll mention is that later on they do attempt to talk about what exactly is happening on the beach. And it’s one of the stupidest jarbled nonsense of science to make this film stay within the realm of realism.

          The actual mystery behind the beach is kind of dumb, but it’s not really a drag because the film keeps up a quick pace as the situation grows more dire. But what is easily the worst aspect of the film is how, including the mystery of the beach, the filmmakers felt like everything had to have a tidy bow and try to be as crisp as possible with its script and not trust the audience. Here’s probably the best example. A character shown skinny dipping early in the morning on the beach washes up while the 2 families are enjoying the beach, and that’s what kickstarts their realization of something off. They find the dead body, and then a few hours later, the body has reduced to bones already. The mom of the main family then provides the audience a rough timeline of how an hour on the beach must represent a few years on the beach; she explains how she comes to this conclusion because she works in a museum. And then everyone else's occupations explain how they know a specific detail of something too. Because people obviously aren’t allowed to have any basis of knowledge of the world if it isn’t directly tied who they are or what they do. The worst of this is from a character named Jarin. He’s exposition central and constantly provides one-sentence answers of what’s possible, what’s happening, or what they should do. There’s a cool visual late in the movie that was foreshadowed from the beginning of the beach, but in the middle of the visual, the character has to explain what is happening in the moment instead of allowing the audience come to that conclusion themselves. This is a relatively smart film that thinks the audience is pretty stupid.

          One thing that I briefly mentioned earlier is the mental effects. And the film felt inconsistent to me on the kids aging physically but staying the same mental age, but when the movie tries to slow down for a second for us to catch our breaths, it’s like our adult characters mature more with their age and settle the personal problems that initially plagued them. The main draw of this film is the thriller nature of rapid aging, but I feel like what could’ve pushed this film from fun thriller to genuinely great film would be to explore the psyche of the characters further. We see touches of this later in the film, but how the character backstories tie in to the story could’ve provided some poignant moments where the characters overcome the flaws that provided their motivation to come for a relaxing vacation in the first place.

          The film keeps at a great pace overall, but it also could’ve ended 5 minutes sooner as the film gloats too long about its ending and ties up all loose ends in predictable manners. How everything actually does come together is pretty smart and some of the effects on the characters are fun to see—like our adult characters starting to lose hearing or vision and how that’s portrayed on the screen. This movie is a mix of smart touches and over-explained plot points. It certainly has its flaws, but it is undeniably entertaining and one of the more unique films you’ll be able to find.