Honestly, this movie exhausted me so much I can’t even think of a pithy age pun to insert here.
I’m not one to ponder my mortality too often. Fretting over another birthday or a new creak in my bones is not a pastime I typically indulge in. Still, I’ve officially crossed over into “middle aged” since I started doing these Halloween marathons and it is likely that I’ve got just as many years behind me as I do in front of me at this point. With that said, I appreciate discovering a horror film this season that has something provocative and interesting to say about getting old. That film, by the way, is Ti West’s excellent X, which I reviewed at the start of the marathon. M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, on the other hand, has precisely nothing to say on the subject despite a premise that seems tailor-made for a rich exploration of the aging process. It is a movie perversely devoid of themes, despite its high concept that places a group of strangers on a beach that ages people much more rapidly than in the normal world. A strong central metaphor might have distracted me from how poorly constructed the movie is, or given me something to gnaw on besides the massive logical inconsistencies within the film’s universe.
I guess I should state that it would be hard to fully explore the idiocy of Old’s plot without getting into some spoilery territory. So if you are inclined to subject yourself to this nonsense out of some sort of morbid curiosity, you may want to stop reading. Don’t worry, I will not telegraph Shyamalan’s signature Big Twist Ending™, but suffice it to say it’s of the variety that crumples under the slightest scrutiny. The general shape of the story is that there are a number of families staying at a fancy resort who have been offered a day trip to an exclusive private beach. When they arrive, it is in fact beautiful, but it soon becomes apparent that they are aging at an inhumanly rapid pace. That means young children are teenagers in a matter of hours, and the elderly are rocketing towards an early expiration. It also means that their cells regenerate at a miraculous pace (if you get cut, the wound immediately closes) which plays a heavy role in the plot mechanics as well. We learn a little about our main couple’s troubled medical and marital situation, and dribs and drabs about the other characters, but largely the movie seeks to get us into the weirdness and then play around with a bunch of half-baked set pieces that exploit the concepts on display. For example, one woman has a tumor, which grows to the size of a bowling ball in a matter of minutes, and the miraculous cell regeneration complicates the attempt to remove it because any incision immediately closes behind itself. In a vacuum, it’s one of the more successful scenes in the movie and seeds an appropriate level of tension. Yet even one of the film’s highlights strains under the odd contortions the script performs in order to set it up. When you factor in the fact that the characters are so uninteresting and flatly acted, it is hard to get too excited over a mild success. When I take a dig at the acting, just so you know, I am really calling into question the director himself. The actors are so uniformly bad, and in such a similar and peculiar way, that I think you have to lay blame at the feet of the filmmaker instead of the talent in front of the camera. The best way I can describe how the film feels is like a television melodrama filmed in another language before being poorly translated and imported to the US. There is a part of me that wants to call out the tone for being all over the place (one character is a professional rapper named Midsized Sedan, but I don’t think it’s meant to be a joke?), but the more accurate critique is that the tone is consistently unpleasant, and not in a deliberate way. To put a finer point on how far this movie misses the mark, there is a scene where Shyamalan takes a potentially interesting idea and fumbles it so spectacularly that it is almost a work of art. Two of the beach-going families have young children that become friends. After a time, they grow into teens and carry all of the biological baggage that goes along with that. In one of the most absurdly silly and grim sequences I’ve ever seen in a movie, the kids (who were that very morning approximately six years old) emerge from a tent having just had sex, and the girl is visibly pregnant. In a matter of seconds, she is full term, delivers the baby, and sets the baby down for a moment where it instantly dies from neglect. It is a testament to how miscalculated this whole segment is that the movie killed a newborn baby and my reaction was to literally guffaw out loud. By the end of Old, the litany of these head-scratching moments combined with the bizarrely unprofessional production quality accumulate in such a way that it forces you to question if the M. Night Shyamalan movies that you remember liking are actually any good. That isn’t even taking into account the inconsistently applied and often frankly nonsensical “rules” of the magic beach. I was shocked to learn that this is not a universally reviled movie, and in fact has its share of defenders among the critical community. For me, though, I had a viscerally negative reaction in a lot of ways that do not seem intended by the director, and in none of the ways he had presumably hoped to elicit from his audience. It’s almost worth your time to experience how bad it can be, but I can’t in good conscience advocate for anyone to watch this fiasco.
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