Old (2021) Review

  

Tagline: It’s only a matter of time. 

Old (2021) Review

 

Here’s the history of the filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan and his filmography summed up as briefly as I can. He hit it big with The Sixth Sense in 1999, a movie everyone knows (“I see dead people”) and then he followed it up with Unbreakable: a superhero movie way ahead of its time. The alien invasion thriller Signs followed, which was the first movie of his I saw, and it scared the hell out of seven-year-old me, but then the great up-and-coming director seemed to lose his magic touch. The man some had forecasted as “the next Steven Spielberg” made The Village, then Lady in the Water, and The Happening. By the end of that string of films, ranging from questionable to terrible, the “Shyamalan twist” had become a pop culture mainstay, because it worked once for The Sixth Sense, so he kept trying to conjure up ever more shocking twist endings, to diminishing results. But, it was 2010’s The Last Airbender that plucked Shyamalan from the ranks of the great working directors and plunged him into the realm of failed auteurs. He’d lost the magic and become a laughing stock. But then, in a redemptive real-life twist worthy of one of his better screenplays, he came back from the shadows with the critically and commercially successful Split in 2016, a genuinely well-made and entertaining thriller with a surprise connection to his earlier film Unbreakable. Shyamalan was back, it seemed, and while his follow-up Glass, which officially tied together Unbreakable and Split and concluded both stories, was a bit of a mixed bag, it seemed to me like maybe he had clambered out of his directing slump.

And then I saw Old.

Let me back up for a second. The last movie I saw in a movie theater before the pandemic was The Invisible Man in March 2020. It was not until June 2021 that I was able to return to the movie theater, and when I did, I was fascinated by all the trailers for movies I didn’t even know were coming out. Whereas once I had been so attune to knowing every major upcoming release, it was a new world of unknowns. The trailer for Old intrigued me with its premise: an inescapable beach where the characters are experiencing inexplicable accelerated aging. It seemed like a classic Shyamalan story, and having been deprived of the theater-going-experience for far too long, I wanted to see everything and anything this past summer, but Old seemed to me like it could go one of two ways: it could be really excellent like Split, or really terrible like The Happening, but entertaining either way.

I was not prepared for what I saw. It wasn’t because I saw it without knowing anything other than what was in the trailer, it wasn’t because I saw it with a special someone, and it wasn’t because I had any real preconceived expectations. This movie felt like a fever dream. I’m not even sure where to start. It almost seemed like it was created by one of those A.I. programs to be the perfect Shyamalan thriller—you know the one, like the meme where it creates a Batman script after being shown all the Batman movies and comes up with hilariously absurd lines like “Happy Bat Day, Birth Man”? Well, this is like that. The M. Night Shyamalan Algorithm spat out Old.

Welcome back to Shyamalan mainstays like bizarre inhuman dialogue and emotionless delivery of lines, but one issue with Old that struck me as anomalous was how weirdly it was shot. There are boring sweeping shots on the beach and some very unclear staging/spacing of characters, which possibly could have been a result of social distancing, given Old was filmed during the pandemic, but then there are many shots where characters are close together and feels a little more like a normal movie, but I rarely felt a sense of normalcy while watching this thing. The characters are pretty standard, basically just your typical vacationers with some marital problems and health issues, and when they arrive at the strange beach there’s an African American man hanging around, who one of the kids recognizes as the famous rapper Mid-Sized Sedan. He is not a real-life rapper, he is just what Shyamalan thought would be a great generic name for an African-American rapper. I can picture M. Night sitting there at his computer typing out the script, thinking of that name, and being so satisfied with himself as he types it out, along with the character’s catchphrase (literally just “damn”) which he says at least five times. I still laugh when I think of the name.

Much like some of the worst Shyamalan movies, this one made me laugh quite a lot, but not because it was supposed to. There are a couple “scary” parts that are so ridiculous they’re hilarious, and a few concepts where Shyamalan “goes there” if you know what I mean, and I won’t spoil them because it’s more shocking if you don’t know. Another one of his mainstays, the twist at the end, really threw me for a loop. It is truly meta, I did not expect it, and I could not believe it. I know this movie is still pretty new at the time of this review coming out, but I have to get into a brief spoiler section for the ending. It’s worth it. If you don’t want to know the twist, skip to the last paragraph.

Spoiler paragraph: the story seemingly comes to an end when the last two characters (the kids who are now adults physically) try to swim past a weird looking reef to escape the beach, they get caught on the coral, and presumably drown. It turns out this mysterious guy who has been observing them from high up on a nearby ridge the whole movie is none other than M. Night Shyamalan himself! He usually gives himself a small cameo, and had already appeared as a driver earlier in the movie, but now here he is, with a camera, having been filming the characters on the beach. He packs up his camera gear, and it seems, for a moment, he has given up on his own movie ending. It’s like he didn’t know how to end it, so the ending is just him concluding the shoot…but then it keeps going, and we get a reveal that the guests at the resort who wind up on the beach were unwittingly part of pharmaceutical trials. It felt like a bit of anti-vax or anti-pharmaceutical social commentary, but I didn’t want to read too much into it. Then it turns out the kids didn’t die and they come back to reveal the truth to the world! It’s an ending that just keeps going, and only gets more absurd as it goes on.

I don’t know how many more movies will truly feel like a product of the pandemic the way this one did, but Old was certainly a unique experience and stands out in a peculiar way amidst Shyamalan’s already peculiar filmography. I’ve done my best to explain the confounding experience of watching it, but after all I’ve said, I still recommend it, oddly enough, but it is not to be watched alone or with the expectation of it being good.