“Old” Review
Thomasin McKenzie (Left) and Alex Wolff star in “Old” as two kids who are rapidly aging on a secluded beach.
Director M. Night Shayamalan’s career continues to bewilder me with his career having more ups and downs than a pogo stick. While creating some of the most original and excellent films of the past few decades (like “The Sixth Sense,” “Unbreakable” and “Split”), he’s also made some truly awful films like “Lady In The Water,” “The Happening” and “The Last Airbender.” He’s truly an enigma of modern cinema. His latest film, “Old” was a film whose premise caused me much anticipation but, sadly, it proves to be just as much of a failure as “The Happening” and, like that film, it’s entertainment value lies in just how insanely bad it is.
Set on a tropical resort, the film sees a group of people (mainly families) enjoying a day at a beautiful beach when they begin to realize that the beach is causing them to age rapidly at a rate of one year every half hour. When people start dying and the dwindling survivors realize they can’t easily leave the beach, they try to go to more extremes to leave as several members of the group begin to lose themselves to decay and insanity.
With a premise like this, this film had the capacity to be a new standard for high-concept mainstream horror, much like 2018’s “A Quiet Place,” but the premise is where all good things about the film cease. The actual screenplay, written by Shayamalan, has some of the worst dialogue I have seen in a film in quite some time. There are no characters in the film, which would require having existent personalities, there are only people with names. The film’s characters don’t have any backstory, they just dump exposition like a player in a murder-mystery party.
And, while I don’t like trashing actors, “Old’s” performances are laughable but, to the actors’ defense, no one could make this dialogue sound natural. I’m not going to fault great actors like Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie for failing to make the script believable.
The biggest sin of “Old” is the way that it lacks any sort of tension that is necessary for any horror film but especially for such a contained setting, suspenseful thriller that “Old” is trying to be. The only thing about the film that warrants any praise is the film’s cinematography because the film’s camerawork really does make you feel disoriented which is the point of the filmmakers. Director of Photography MIke Gioulakis and Shayamalan certainly know how to make this beach feel very claustrophobic. Everything else simply falls flat.
However, I can easily see the film garnering a cult following in the same vein as “The Room,” the films of Ed Wood or even Shamylan’s “The Happening:” films that are so bad in how much they fail to elicit the emotions they’re going for that they’re actually hilarious. There were times throughout “Old” that members of the audience I saw the film with started laughing out loud and I joined them. This is definitely a film where entertainment can be found, just not the kind of entertainment Shyamalan is probably expecting.
