With the latitude of fantastical contexts, the best genre filmmaking examines social and philosophical considerations to deliver salient observations on the human condition. In just American cinema, we might look to 2001: A Space Odyssey, Blade Runner, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Arrival and Gattaca – films that take on deeper thematic grist than the most of today’s dramas. Or we could just call it a day with a pair of contemplative Russian sci-fi classics: Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stalker.
Minus illusions that populist M. Night Shyamalan is contemplating quite as profoundly, he nonetheless has crafted a smart and entertaining new studio picture in Old, the sort of film where the less said the better. This clever thriller about parents and children, trauma, regret and mortality works as a heady commercial curio in its tale of a twilight zone of sorts—in which a half-hour of time accelerates one year of age. It is fast paced, consistently absorbing and beautifully shot. It frequently works and, unlike Tarkovsky, goes down easily.
Made during the pandemic on location in the Dominican Republic and adapted from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, the picture involves an unlikely band of vacationing strangers intersecting at a tony tropical resort before embarking upon a VIP excursion to a secluded beach. The coast, walled by a high cliff on one side and a riptide on the other, offers aesthetic wonder. But why has this group been assembled? What do they have in common?
Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) are troubled married couple apparently nearing divorce. Guy (Bernal) is an insurance actuary and passive husband to Prisca (Krieps), an art curator; the pair has taken their two kids on a vacation getaway promising to be “better than Cancun.” Naturally, there are family secrets ripe to be revealed.
The picture kicks into gear on an irresistible offer from the resort’s manager of a discreet day trip to an apparent paradise on the other side of the island, a private beach reserved for only for the most special guests. Up to this point, Old is reasonably watchable with the exception of a certain grating child actor who gives new meaning to precocious.
Upon arriving they experience every traveler’s nightmare—that a found paradise must be shared with others, including a mysterious (and possibly mad) doctor (Rufus Sewell), his younger, narcissistic trophy wife (Abby Lee, terrific), their young daughter and his aged mother. Also on the scene is an epileptic psychoanalyst (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her husband (Ken Leung), a nurse. But what’s with the brooding, bleeding hip hop artist named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) and the suddenly washed-up corpse of his female companion?
Shyamalan wastes no time plunging us into this little nightmare, his deceptive tropical beauty harboring unexplainable forces that create a pile up of eerie events—a rapidly decomposed body, children that rapidly accelerate to teenhood (Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, both terrific), the birth of a baby, a “benign” tumor that accelerates to rapid, massive maturity, rising mental instabilities, shockingly violent outbursts and a cave and sea that block escape.
With no escape fate must be accepted, and in these stretches the film reaches substantive catharsis. Yet since this is an M. Night Shyamalan picture, there is a closing coda which, in the film’s final, populist moments, diffuses the sober realities of the picture’s established world. But there is enough good acting, amusing ironies, psychological complexity, horrific shocks and energetic filmmaking; courtesy of disorienting lenses and ingenious dolly shots suggesting a world askew with both phenomena and intense paranoia.
Shyamalan, whose 1999 breakout hit The Sixth Sense established him as a major Hollywood director while (too soon) coronating him the next Spielberg, has for many years labored under the onus that each successive picture’s twist ending needed to top his last, and that the element of surprise be paramount to all. And it is partially true—the price of his successful dictated a higher bar for surprise endings each time out (sometimes with diminishing returns as in The Happening and The Village).
In Old, he demonstrates that he hasn’t lost his ability to pull the run from under us, though the ending this time isn’t a whopper of a surprise—we know something is afoot—but instead proves mildly intriguing. The final scenes are a copout, and unnecessary, in the sort of determined-to-tie-things-up way that lessens the impact of the picture’s well-mounted premise.
Yet the ending is forgivable in that this time Shyamalan displays welcome curiosity for character and emotion.
3 stars.
