Old

In making Old, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan obviously saw the film as an opportunity to indulge in both his best and worst qualities as a filmmaker.  The strengths that can be found here are in its bizarre and intriguing premise, about an island paradise where aging is sped up to the span of 50 years within 24 hours.  A group of people become trapped on the beach, and there seems to be no escape.  It must be said that Shyamalan tackles this premise the right way, creating a kind of mystery that we don't want to solve.  We just are along for the ride, and enjoying the unsettling weirdness of it all.

Then he has to go and ruin the fun by actually trying to explain and rationalize what is going on in a final 10 minutes that fails to stick any sort of landing.  By trying to solve the mystery he's created, he winds up lessening the impact.  The film is adapted from a graphic novel called Sandcastle, which I have not read, but doing some research have learned that in the original story, the nature of the rapid aging and the reasoning behind it was kept completely a mystery.  The explanations that come in the final moments are entirely the work of Shyamalan.  Here is a movie that creates a fun atmosphere of uneasiness, despite the sometimes stilted dialogue and wooden acting on display. (Another trademark of the filmmaker that is on display here.) It's only when it tries to make sense of itself that it trips up, and the movie completely lost me.

The movie opens by introducing us to a dysfunctional family that are having one last holiday together before mom, Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and dad, Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) call it quits.  They're visiting a luxury resort with their kids, Trent (Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton), and although they put on the face of a happy family, the parents frequently argue out of sight of the children, with dialogue that sound like no argument any human being has ever had before.  At breakfast, the resort manager tells them about a private beach where they can relax, and they are driven there by Shyamalan himself, fulfilling his required pointless cameo quota.  On the beach, they find a few select guests have been invited there as well, including a shady doctor (Rufus Sewell), along with his trophy wife (Abbey Lee), their young daughter (Mikaya Fisher), and elderly mother (Kathleen Chalfant).  There's a young couple (Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird) there too, and a famous rapper as well who goes by the name Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre).

Despite the island paradise setting, Shyamalan does successfully create a feeling of menace and isolation early on.  The waters seem oddly rough and violent, and the rock walls that surround the beach are imposing and imprisoning.  And then a dead body is washed ashore.  The rapper seems to know the body, as it's the person he's visiting with.  But, he's acting very aloof and odd, and his nose is bleeding.  This raises suspicion toward him, especially from the doctor.  Then Guy and Prisca discover that their two kids have seemingly aged five years in about the span of an hour.  Naturally, nobody is able to get a signal on their cell phone to call for help, and when they try to walk back up the path they took to get to the beach, they experience severe headaches, black out, and find themselves back on the sand with the group.  The adults start aging as well, experiencing blindness and deafness the longer they stay on the beach, while the dead body that washed ashore earlier has now completely decomposed in a matter of minutes.

I have to admit, I was fully with Old for a good part of it.  Sure, the dialogue was clunky and made up largely of exposition, and yeah, some of the acting was off.  But the movie creates such a visceral feeling of dread and tension that it's hard not to get caught up.  Despite this, the movie does stumble in some other ways, such as how it's clearly been forced to fulfill a PG-13 rating, by having some of the more violent and disturbing moments be filmed as rapid blurs, or kept off camera.  It especially seems muted when it tries to hint at the possible sexual exploration of the children as they age, which I think robs the film of what could have been some compelling and disquieting moments.  Still, it was the kind of movie where the flaws were plainly visible, but I was still along for the ride.  

If only Shyamalan knew when to bail out, we could have had an eerie little movie.  Instead we get an ending that started out rubbing me the wrong way as soon as the answers started coming, and then continued to do so as it went on.  I want to avoid spoilers here, so I won't go into detail.  As the revelations came, I found myself wanting to go back to not knowing the answer.  I didn't need to know why these people were trapped on this beach, how, and just who was responsible for it all.  Here is a movie that works better when it is a mess, rather than when it tries to tidy everything up with a traditional Hollywood ending.  The weirdness of it all is what was keeping me engaged, as the characters themselves are certainly nothing to shout about.

Old is such an odd film, both intentionally and otherwise, that it's kind of disappointing that it finds it necessary to explain itself at all.  Like I said, I have not read the source material, but I have a hunch that it did a better job of holding onto a proper tone.  It's too bad the movie didn't follow suit.

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