At this point it is no shocking comment that the films of M. Night Shyamalan are a seriously mixed bag. However where once it seemed that his career had dove off a cliff and every new Shyamalan film we received was a treat for all lovers of “so bad they’re good movies”, now a new Shyamalan release is a real up in the air situation where the viewer doesn’t really know how good it is until it’s all over. Old is such a film where it’s concept, from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Frederick Peeters and Pierre-Oscar Levy, is such a thrilling and intriguing one that a viewer cannot help but get entranced. However a third act over-dependence on exposition and a script plagued with some of the most bizarre and un-naturalistic dialogue I have ever heard, delivered by many great actors just doing their best, leads to Old being a film lying for me somewhere in the middle of Shyamalan’s best, worst and certainly his most bizarre.

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A beach that makes you grow older and older until you turn to dust at the rate of about 3 days a second is a truly horrifying concept and Old knows it, for the most part anyway. When Old is at its best, it’s a thrilling horror with a concept filled with so much terror and dread that you can’t look away. But when Old is at its worst, is frankly when the actors just can’t get over the shoddiness of the script itself. Now in regards to structure, when we are on the beach the film develops its plot and the arc of its horror very well, with questions around the concept being answered or abandoned very early on, leading to the film to purely focus on the effect of its concept rather than how it came about. Until of course one of the worst plot devices I’ve seen in a very long time leads to a finale so terrible convoluted that one can’t help but cringe and long for a cut to black, as Shyamalan in excruciating detail explains every inch of what has been going the whole time, even choosing this part of the film to have his directorial cameo. No whether or not a reviewer guesses the ending of a film prior to it revealing itself should by no means make the film more or less worthy, however despite the truly ridiculous nature of this films conclusion, I did indeed guess it around the 30 minute mark. I sincerely would be so much interested in a Groundhog Day style feature where the inherent concept of the film is never explained nor has to be for the film to work. The script’s second biggest problem is an extreme over-abundance of terrible dialogue delivered somewhat capably by actors doing good work for the most part, but struggling majorly with just how convoluted and unnatural a lot of the dialogue is. Characters talk to one another like a first draft, or even something even slighter than that even. It’s a truly bizarre and unnatural affair that leads the film to feel wholly clinical and without emotion whenever these great actors are not on their game, which fortunately is not a rarity.

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All that being said however, some of the film’s best moments are its most human ones, as in later dramatic scenes where certain characters give up fighting against this viscous cycle and except their bleak fate. For a couple of pages and completely out of the blue, the script becomes pretty great. A huge shock to me, and the actors are given something to work with and work with they do. Let’s talk about those actors, because one thing’s for certain, with a less stacked cast this film would be absolutely intolerable I feel. Vicky Krieps and Gael Garcia Bernal are the mother and father of the main family, and both do wonderful work, but still feel horribly stunted when they can’t get over the hurdles of some of the terrible lines. Thomasin Mckenzie who I thought was truly excellent in JoJo Rabbit here was a bit of a weak link, with a terrible high pitched American accent that didn’t work for the character at all and removed a lot of the effect of her character. Alex Wolff plays the son in this family for the most part of the film and delivers again with the kind of highly emotional performance that he gave us in Hereditary. Rufus Sewell continues his 2021 resurgence and continues to be one of my most underrated actors. Let’s please keep getting this man work. Abby Lee, Nicki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung and Aaron Pierre make up the rest of the chief centre ensemble and all manage to infuse the right amounts of paranoia and pure fear that one would naturally expect in this circumstance. Oh and the humour, I forgot to mention some of the absolutely terrible and again stunted attempts at humour. Old really is a stunningly bizarre piece of work, but when it comes to quality... well.

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Shyamalan writes and directs this 4/10 effort with a seriously bizarre off-kilter film style making it in many ways one of his most filmicly experimental films to date, however this experimentation is solely within the form of the feature and is not a wholly successful experiment at that, for beyond the style of the film it is in its plot sense a wholly exposition heavy foray into an hour and 50 minute Twilight Zone format that really would I feel have been a lot better served by a lack of explanation and a purer focus on the characters and the dread of their circumstances. Great actors delivering some absolutely insanely bad dialogue, filled with some interesting horror touches. Not great, but very watchable, but one doubts re-watchable.

P.S. Absolutely excellent work all around on both the make-up front and the casting when it came to growing these characters through the years. The subtleties of the makeup on the likes of Sewell, Bernal and Krieps by Tony Gardner and his team were truly excellent and never once required any kind of belief stretching. Much the same can be said for the casting by Douglas Aibel, who specifically in the case of the characters of Trent and Maddox found three actors of entirely different generations that completely and genuinely looked like one another twenty years apart each time. Great work from all involved, I can only imagine how much worse this film would have been without this great work, or with an over-dependence on CGI.

P.P.S. This review went down a whole point from 5 to 4 after a discussion with a friend where we quite frankly ripped the film apart and every single plot hole. Boy, there's a lot. 

-        -  Thomas Carruther