M. Night Shyamalan is not the filmmaker he once was. Visually the director that gave us The Sixth Sense and Signs is as sharp as ever, with an incredible eye for detail and inventive ways to utilise the camera. But as latest film Old demonstrates, Shyamalan’s writing still hasn’t managed to recapture that same visceral shock and emotion that his early work electrified with. Based around a graphic novel that feels tailor made for his twist heavy style – a group of families on a beach struggling to figure out why time is rapidly moving forward – Shyamalan drowns the concept in godawful dialogue, one-note characters and his usual (of late, at least) nonsensical twists.
When struggling couple Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) arrive at a glamorous beach resort (an online bargain Prisca happened upon) with their children Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River), they are thrilled to be offered a trip to a private beach for the day. Discovering they share the large stretch of beach with a few other families – including doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell) and his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and daughter Kara (Kylie Begley), rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) and the epileptic Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her husband Jarin (Ken Leung) – the group make the most of their relaxation until fun is disrupted by the discovery of a body laying in a nearby cove.
Attempting to make their way back to the resort, the group realise they are trapped on the beach, an inconvenience further complicated by the fact that their cells are ageing rapidly, with the children becoming teens in mere minutes. Racing against the biological clock, the adults must carefully balance the complicated personalities on the beach in hopes of finding a way out before they expire, while the children struggle to come to terms with their changing bodies.
There’s a lot of characters at play in Old – a film that relies solely on the interactions between them – and almost all of them are hollow caricatures of actual people; painful stereotypes that never seem to behave or communicate in a realistic way. Shyamalan’s script seems the prime suspect, reducing each character to a single defining trait. Take García Bernal’s Guy for example. We’re told early on that he works as an actuary, assessing risk and calculating the likelihood of accidents. Now that we know that, Shyamalan constantly feels the need to remind us by having Guy blurt out statistics at the most callous of moments – when everyone else is reacting to a death Guy is denying the accident that caused it. Nothing about the setup of Guy’s character suggests that this warm family man would suddenly behave like this, but Shyamalan needs to convey just how crazy the situation is and sacrifices any goodwill the audience might have for Guy by changing his character in order to further the mystery.
The premise itself is intriguing on the surface. The potential for playing with the body horror aspect of rapid ageing alone could provide enough substance for an entire movie but Shyamalan never capitalises on the promise of the concept, simply hurrying from one shocking moment to the next. The body the group found turns to dust minutes later? No time for that, a 6 year-old has suddenly aged and become pregnant and… we’ve moved onto the next catastrophe.
M. Night seems so obsessed with cramming as many time-based ideas into the film as possible that nothing is given the time it needs to breathe and have an impact. That rapid pregnancy scene should be the highlight of the film: a tense build towards an ultimately tragic and painful outcome. Instead it lasts a total of four minutes in a two hour film. Time may be moving fast on the beach but there’s no reason that Shyamalan couldn’t have spent a little more to craft moments that feel earned.
Then there’s the inevitable twist – no spoilers here – which really doesn’t alter the film at all other than allowing it to have some kind of half-baked conclusion. Shyamalan’s films have built this inherent audience expectation for twists over the years that the filmmaker now feels the need to have one, regardless of whether or not it works in the story. The information the twist provides here doesn’t enhance or detract from what we have already watched, instead putting it into a rather generic context that doesn’t clearly convey whatever half-baked message Shyamalan is shooting for, only raising more questions that are never answered.
Old is yet another misfire from M. Night Shyamalan that places concept above story, introducing an intriguing mystery that never lives up to its premise. Bad writing, bland characters and a lack of any truly inspired horror sequences overshadow any inventive camerawork that Shyamalan employs, wasting his cast of talented newcomers and veterans in search of the next rushed shock moment that fails to shock. You might go in thinking it can’t be that bad, but sooner or later you’ll be begging to join the poor souls trapped on the beach just to get through Old that little bit faster.
Old stars Gael García Bernal, Vickey Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, Eliza Scanlen & Aaron Pierre – Coming to Digital, Blu-Ray and DVD soon.