Old (2021)

 Score: 3.5 / 5

A nuclear family is en route to their exclusive beachside vacation. Rolling into the high-class resort is about as perfect as you can imagine it, even with two young children Maddox and Trent. Specialty cocktails are presented to parents Guy and Prisca (Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps), based apparently on their previously established food and nutrient preferences. The clientele are remarkably diverse, but all are living their best life between lounging at the spa and dining in full view of the tropical ocean bay. The resort manager -- who we briefly see acting hostile to a little brown boy -- tells the main family of a secluded beach, impossible to stumble across, they might especially like to explore. The drive there is chauffeured by M. Night Shyamalan, the mildly creepy director almost winking at us with an "I'm baaack" kind of delivery, literally reminding us that he's in control of assembling everything we're about to see.

That's just about the only metafictional element in Old, Shyamalan's latest directorial project, but it's effective for those of us who are generally willing to let him take us for a weird ride. The title is odd, and I wondered briefly if this would be some uncomfortable ageist horror, akin to what he gave us in The Visit in 2015. Although even that was more aesthetically and intellectually satisfying that some of his recent forays into more standard science fiction, but let's hope he's back on track now. His oeuvre certainly seems to be back here, namely in his thematic concern for the people he leaves on the secret beach, if not so much in plot or development.

Other people come to the beach, too, and I was initially worried about having to remember all the names. Once I realized the names don't matter, my anxiety waned: there's a doctor (Rufus Sewell) and his wife (Abbey Lee), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and young daughter. There's a third couple without children (Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a quiet man with a bleeding nose already on the beach (Aaron Pierre). An ensemble cast is not unfamiliar territory for Shyamalan, but for arguably the first time in his career, he balances all of them well, often allowing his cinematographer and editor to isolate the characters in extreme close-ups with a blurry handheld camera, forcing us into one character's experience at a time. This is important to allow us access to the characters, but also to establish the rules of the film: everyone is on their own on this beach, despite the appearance that they're all in it together.

In what? In hell, perhaps. The relatively calm water grows more foamy and wavy as the day progresses, the sun climbs higher in a clear sky to bake the sand, and the cliff walls surrounding the secret beach seem to grow taller. The only way out is a cave-like crevice in the cliff face, but each time someone tries to pass through, they pass out and reawaken on the beach. As their flirtation with madness becomes concerning, a more pressing issue manifests: time is fleeting, and with each passing hour, they age roughly two years. By what we imagine is lunchtime, the young children have become young adults (played wonderfully by Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, and Eliza Scanlen) and the older ones begin to exhibit their own problems, from cancerous tumors to hearing and vision loss and even dementia. By the time a day will pass, half their lives will be gone; this means, too, that half of them will die by old age, if not by anything more insidious.

The screenplay, ambitious as it is with a truly terrifying conceit, never quite manages to do more than act like a kid in a sandbox, pushing people around to interact with each other for forced dramatic purpose. Most of the dialogue is heavily expository, filled with "what do we do now" and "this can't be happening" and even "remember when" stories about each other's medical or developmental history. Of course, it might be easy to read this all as thick or even lazy writing, but I think Shyamalan is dangerously close to realism here. After all, most of these folks are strangers, and it's not like they have a lot of time to discover, learn, test, fail, attempt again, and finally escape the accursed beach; they need to communicate bluntly and with lots of information, much as a group trying to solve an escape room. And with time relentlessly ticking, the consequences will be fatal.

Old is at its most chilling when exploring these consequences. It's not so much about solving the mystery of the beach -- which is why the final sequence (so often Shyamalan's most-debated scenes) is a bit of a letdown -- as it is about dealing with the reality of the beach's mystery. For this reason, the existential horror of the film should have been taken as its aesthetic. We get plenty of gruesome scares, from dead bodies washing up on the beach and young women falling from cliff faces to aging bones splintering and a madman slashing away at survivors with a knife. But for each moment of earned, unadulterated horror, the film slickly looks away, cutting out just as the violence occurs; some audiences will like this, as it focuses our attention on what we don't see and on the inner lives of the characters. I would argue that this technique undermines the thrilling and troubling elements of the story, minimizing our experience of the pain and agony that these characters are suffering. I want to see this same movie again, but with the potential body horror fully realized by a director willing to go all the way.

Shyamalan has certainly managed to make a career out of being unexpected, and often suggesting surrealism in otherwise realistic settings. But this movie is the first time I wanted so much more from him in execution: the evocative beach and dramatically fecund observations on aging would have paired well with full-on body horror as the characters broke down psychologically as well as physiologically. The closest we get to it, apart from the explicitly violent moments, are the terrifying moments when the camera hovers around one of the children's heads, hands, or feet. We see the reactions of people beholding the child that has suddenly aged, but we're kept in eerie suspense as we await the new makeup -- or new actor -- that will signify the child's new age. Effective as these moments are at highlighting the devastation of age, they feel unfulfilled as the film struggles to catch up with all the characters going through their own reckonings.

It's a wonderful reminder of the brilliance of this director, and I think Old will be remembered fondly alongside some of his earlier movies like The Village and Lady in the Water. As with those, its devotion to specifics is its downfall. When Shyamalan embraces ambiguity, his movies shine. With this one, he seems to know this, and taps into the meat of things just enough to keep the whole affair entertaining, provocative, and emotional. But then he pulls out, leaving those of us attuned to the genre feeling that a little bit more would have gone a long damn way. Then again, he always leaves us wanting more, and that's not a bad thing either.