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.

The Devil All the Time (2020)

 Score: 1.5 / 5

It's at least the devil for two hours, and that was more than enough for me. The new Netflix drama The Devil All the Time dropped this weekend, and I was ready for Spider-man to go full Southern Gothic. As I sipped pinot noir, I was treated to a haunting opening sequence of WWII in which American soldiers come across one of their own sergeants crucified on a battlefield by the Japanese. To end his suffering, Willard (Bill Skarsgard) shoots him in the head. After his return home in Ohio, he gets married and has a son named Arvin, whom he raises in their rural Christian faith. But, thanks in large part to Skarsgard's shell-shocked and glistening eyes, we know that Willard has seen actual horrors every time he beholds his religious crosses. It's this sort of timeless reminder of the bloody basis of Christianity I expected from the movie, and it's one that would have more than satisfied me.

But then the movie almost immediately falters, and never recovers. We are suddenly thrust into the lives of other, seemingly unconnected characters, and we quickly lose track of whatever timeline we should be following. The film rockets us across time and place, from Ohio to West Virginia, from 1945 to 1965 and several times between, and through crucial moments in the lives of no fewer than eight people. It doesn't help that many of them look and act the same. I was quite lost well before the halfway point of the movie, which seemed to consist of episodic scenes depicting depravity, violence, and cruelty. In fact, the violence is often so sudden and so graphic that I wondered if this was meant as a straight-up horror flick. But the melodrama greatly outweighs anything, which renders these scenes grotesque and the whole of the film little more than poverty porn.

The main plot follows Arvin (Tom Holland, unexpectedly flexing his acting chops) as he comes of age. He fiercely protects his step-sister Lenora (Eliza Scanlen) from any and all evil but of course is unable to stem the tide of evil in the world. He then embarks on a journey of revenge that costs many more lives than necessary, and in his bloody wake the hounds close in, notably the corrupt Sheriff (Sebastian Stan) seeking revenge for his sister (Riley Keough). His sister, mind, is a serial killer who was killed by Arvin along with her hubby Carl (Jason Clarke) after they attempted to abduct and kill Arvin. Oh, and I can't forget that Lenora's mother (Mia Wasikowska) was killed by her preacher father (Harry Melling) who handles spiders instead of snakes and starts hallucinating after one too many bites, thinking he can resurrect the dead.

Sound crazy? It is, and this is only the first half of the damn movie.

Indeed, I can conceive of little reason this movie exists at all, except to say that the American heartland -- at least its Appalachian foothills -- is populated by a cast of stupid, violent people whose religious fanaticism has long been its only social standard and who escape the sad realities of their lives through violence and vengeance. It is increasingly difficult to make narrative or thematic sense of any of it, partly due to the bizarre editing and unremarkable production design, partly due to the unfocused and broad scope of its screenplay. We're not allowed into any character's psyche because we are yanked between characters too often. Even the most delicious performance in the film -- I'd say the performances are wonderful across the board -- is lost in the messy void: Robert Pattinson, whose crisp, clean preacher with a campy, overbearing personality is as delightful as it is surprising, and I'm not sure it fits within its context. Which may be the point, but as nothing else here compares to it in tone or delivery, I find his relative lack of consequence troubling.

Ultimately, the movie feels like a vicious fever dream, an uninspired attempt at Gothicizing rural America by demonizing its religious foundations -- which arguably deserve this kind of treatment, and more -- and exploiting the impoverished and uneducated lower classes. For example, we derive a certain pleasure in seeing the insane preacher pouring live spiders on his face, sure, and even seeing him get his comeuppance, but the film's question of stopping the cycle of violence is made irrelevant by the cruelty and stupidity of its protagonist. There is little worth watching in this movie, from its incoherent plot incomprehensibly strung together by a laughably bad voiceover narrator (apparently the author of the book that inspired this movie) to its squandered cast of A-listers, and finally to its celebration of the banality of evil in the heartland. What a damned waste.

Little Women (2019)

Score: 4.5 / 5

The pleasant surprise of the year for me is Greta Gerwig's second directorial outing, a new adaptation of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. I liked Lady Bird, her debut film, well enough to recognize a rising auteur with wit, talent, and gumption. But her newest film demonstrates exceptional brilliance in both adapting the story and telling it -- yet again, as if we really needed it -- with stunning relevance and ingenuity. Even knowing the story and characters well won't stop you from enjoying this iteration as if it were all brand new.

Gerwig's depth of knowledge about the source material allows her to do some truly amazing work here, cutting up the narrative and dividing it into parallel acts that run concurrently. As we flip back and forth in time, brilliant new insights and ironies burst into bloom before us that were always there in the novel but never as clear. Gerwig's control informs the tone as well: her lived-in familiarity with the material allows her to play with strong senses of memory and nostalgia and hope and anxiety that are simply not as potent in the traditional linear narrative. Specifically, early sequences that juxtapose Laurie (Timothee Chalamet) and the sisters growing up with scenes of Laurie in his post-Jo European adventures showcase the dynamic ways these characters change over only seven (?) years. Later, in the film's climax, we get the two bouts of Beth's illness, bringing questions of fate into thematic discussion.

These kinds of moves make this Little Women feel rejuvenated while also keenly aware of its lasting, timeless impact as a core cultural work of art. It becomes at once accessible to newcomers while reviving interest and fascination in old fans. It helps, too, that the performers are all eminently likable and give stunning performances, perhaps nowhere more than in Florence Pugh's stunning delivery of Amy, whose dramatic shifts can sometimes appear shrewish but here feel grounded and powerful as a force of willful, profoundly human womanhood -- a force of nature, in fact. Saoirse Ronan brings her typical brilliance and fury to Jo but underscores it with potent unspoken desire. Laura Dern plays Marmee perhaps the best I've seen, though the film favors her character less than the four daughters. And then there's the costumes, which are uniformly breathtaking, works of pristine and visionary art.

The finale, though, is Gerwig's crowning glory in making this adaptation relevant and important. The ending here lies solely with Ronan's Jo, flustered and winded but absolutely triumphant as she watches her novel being printed. Once the finished copy is in her hands, I totally lost my composure. Having refused to compromise her worth -- though she does subtly compromise her artistic vision -- Jo is usually seen as a stand-in for Alcott herself, who was forced to change the ending of her novel into one that has its female protagonist married by the end. Throughout Gerwig's vision, we're never quite sure how in love Jo is with her intellectual equal and romantic gentleman caller, but by the end Jo is quite on her own. Sure, Friedrich is with her in the final scene, but they are not identified as partners in any way except as facilitators of Jo's new school, opened in Aunt March's house. It's an inspiring ending that smacks of artistic and historic integrity in ways we simply haven't seen yet from this story.