OLD: A Sinking Feeling

Among my favorite traits of M. Night Shyamalan’s movies is how he builds contrasts between loneliness and companionship that his characters feel. The majority of Shyamalan’s central characters are always, at one time or another, tugged between a true connection to either their family, community, or significant other, and the aching loneliness (and fear) of death. These are themes that, given Old’s premise of a group of people trapped on a secluded beach and rapidly aging, would make for a heart-rending thriller. They certainly are a big part of the source graphic novel’s (Sandcastle by Pierre-Oscar Lévy & Frederick Peeters) emotional weightage. So it was very surprising and disappointing that Shyamalan’s latest nightmare is so cold and dry.

A Good First Half…

The movie adds a good amount of background context to its sparse/minimalist source material, actually displaying the resort and potential corporate mechanism behind the beach where the group of people is stranded. Unlike a lot of Shyamalan’s pre-Airbender work, which didn’t hesitate to start with a melancholy and brooding mood, Old is very much tonally ‘post-resurgence’ Shyamalan, full of humorous quips and a light and airy atmosphere that takes its time descending into its devilish premise. He has always been great with writing children in particular and here’s no different. We’re automatically drawn to the two kids, Trent (Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton), who have a caring sibling relationship, and Trent, in particular, is a signature recurrent character type of Shyamalan’s films – the bold and nerdy kid whose demeanor is older than he is. The kids quickly become the source of heart in the film and the movie’s most tragic and affecting scenes, and Shyamalan’s best directorial and writing instincts, involve them.

A lot of Shyamalan’s (and DP Mike Gioulakis) camera choices are bold and noticeable, and alternate from being exhilarating (like the brilliant panning/tracking sequence of the kids playing on the beach) to frustrating in their clever (though sometimes tedious) obfuscation, like the slow reveal of the children’s rapid age change. The risk-taking in technical work and grammatical decisions is one of the bright spots in this film, especially in an age where “cinema literacy” has resulted in increased homogenization. Camera placements and tracking shots, many of which allow a free-flowing continuation that doesn’t adhere to audial cues, are some of the most radical of Shyamalan’s career. Add to that a number of the cast members bring out some good performances particularly Thomasin McKenzie (Maddox), Vicky Kreips (Prisca), Niki Amuka-Bird (Patricia), and Rufus Sewell (Charles) all of whom hit the balance of paranoia and whimsy that the movie deftly navigates in its first half. But it’s the second half, where Shyamalan’s writing starts to fall apart, that drowns the movie’s intrigue.

… and A Lacking Second Half

If Signs and The Village were three-fourths of a great movie, Old is merely half of one. Whatever emotional momentum was built through the first half, especially in its establishment of each individual character’s persona, completely halts halfway through and turns into a bizarrely rote set of plot points all surrounding death scenes. What’s more bizarre is that these death scenes aren’t even horrific or affecting in a meaningful way, they sort of just happen, characters cry and then they move on until the next one occurs. Ironically, the most disturbing and gutting scene in the film is actually a birth – when Kara (Eliza Scanlen), who still clearly has the mind of a child despite being a young woman physically, starts to go into labor, she begs mercifully for the companionship of her superficial and haughty mother who promptly abandons her. Here too, the camerawork is impeccable by the way, pulling away from the scene as Kara reaches her hand out and screams “mom”.

Everything else though plays out in a very cold and calculated manner where explicit decisions to find safety and escape are made and abandoned and eventually lead to death without any poignant or grounded moments between them. Much of the source material’s myth-building and morally introspective depth both narratively and visually are replaced with things that simply keep chugging the plot along towards what, based on reputation, hopes to be the ‘big reveal’. It’s a puzzling decision by Shyamalan who, in his best works (The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable), and even some of his lesser ones (Lady in the Water, The Happening), always seeks to build humanistic fables that use psychological ticks that ultimately transcend the characters who embody them and reveal a greater collective myth within the story. Think of the “swing-away” or unfinished glasses of water in Signs, or Ivy’s blindness in The Village, or the individual talents of each resident of the apartment complex in Lady in the Water. There are pieces of such things in Old, where characters have some sort of mental, emotional, or physical ailment that lends itself to revealing a greater truth about why they’re there (and eventually why they were chosen). Their occupations are also constantly brought up – something Trent’s own weird curiosity hang-ups leads us on early in the movie.

Conclusion

Yet, most of it is for naught, and the film latches all of its stakes in the end on cliché genre notes – a race against time underwater, decoding secret messages, “killing a few to save many” etc. – that frankly are uninteresting and hokey. I won’t get into details about the end reveal here, but all I can say is that it’s easily Shyamalan’s most unimaginative and morally dubious, and moral messaging is something his spiritual/agnostic filmography generally is careful with. Old can’t really even fall back on being just a silly entertaining genre romp like The Visit, because its narrative arch is emotionally sterile. I have always said that Shyamalan’s ability to direct and his ability to write are not consistently in sync with each other and as Old keeps going, they drift further and further apart and start to sink.

Old was released on July 21st, 2021 and is playing in theaters nationwide across the U.S.

---

Watch Old