Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: M. Might Shyamalan
Starring: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Eliza Scanlen, Thomasin McKenzie, Alex
Wolff, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird,
Embeth Davidtz
When you review four or five new movies every week you inevitably come
across a lot of turkeys. Occasionally you stumble across a free-range
turkey, a movie that's objectively bad yet is clearly made by talented
hands. M. Night Shyamalan is the modern master of the free-range
turkey. Most of the movies he's made over the last 20 years have been
pretty rough, yet there's always a diamond in the coalface that makes his
work worth continuing to mine.
Old is just such a movie. Overall it's a mess. As with so
many of Shyamalan's films it boasts a killer premise but never manages to
exploit its potential. The dialogue is clunky as hell. The plot leaves you
scratching your head with its many holes and oversights. The camerawork
and editing are at times baffling. Yet for all that, there are brief, all
too brief, glimpses of filmmaking brilliance that make Shyamalan one of
the more interesting filmmakers working in mainstream cinema today,
despite all his flaws.
The blame for this one can't entirely be levelled at Shyamalan as
Old is adapted from a graphic novel by
Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederick Peeters. You can see why the
director was attracted to the project as its premise could easily have
come from his own imagination. On a
Fantasy Island
style resort, a group of people are left on a secluded, seemingly idyllic
beach, only to find themselves aging at a rate that equates to roughly one
year for every 30 minutes. The only way out is through a cave that speeds
up the aging process so much that you'd be dead before you made it
through.
It's a cracking premise, isn't it? But sometimes the most arresting ideas
just don’t translate into a feature film.
Old is about the role time plays in our lives. Near the end
of the movie, one character, who is in their dotage by that point,
expresses regret at wasting their time trying to find a way out of their
predicament. The back half of their life passed them by in a matter of
hours because they were too busy trying to escape from their life rather
than sitting back and enjoying their time on the beach. Most of us live
for roughly 80 decades, but how much of that time is spent actually
living? Humans have developed a system that forces us to waste the bulk of
our lives building security for a future we may not even make it to, and
if we do, we'll probably be too knackered by that point to enjoy our
freedom.
It takes a long time for Shyamalan's film to make that point though, and
you'll probably have lost patience with the movie before you can figure
out what Shyamalan is trying to say in his own clunky way. You'll probably
have grown frustrated with the film's half-assed approach to its central
idea. You'll probably be distracted by questions like "If everyone is
aging rapidly, why aren't their hair and nails growing?", "Why aren't
their teeth rotting?" and "Why do the children seem to develop adult
intellects as they rapidly age, without the years of experience and
knowledge behind them?" Or you'll have grown irritated by the
distractingly showy camerawork, all long pans that lead nowhere.
Early in his career Shyamalan was labelled "The New Spielberg," an
impossible burden for any filmmaker to carry. If anything, Shyamalan might
be the new Rod Serling, but Serling told his stories in 30 minutes, not
105. It's ironic that Old is about the time we waste,
because it's really a Twilight Zone episode stretched out to
feature length. If Shyamalan were born three decades earlier he'd probably
be known for some of the best half hours of TV of the late 20th century,
rather than for some of the worst feature films of the early 21st century.
If Shyamalan is indeed Spielberg, then he's certainly not the Spielberg of
the Raiders of the Lost Ark truck chase or the "We're gonna
need a bigger boat" shock or Roy Neary discovering the real life mountain
he's been making out of mashed potato. But he might be the Spielberg of
Chief Brody's kid imitating his father's movements at the dinner table.
Shyamalan is brilliant at developing characters through small visual
gestures, something he sadly doesn't do enough of. There's an incredible
moment in Old where Vicky Krieps asks her husband
Gael Garcia Bernal to name the book she's currently reading. He
hasn't a clue. She frowns and inserts her bookmark, towards the back of
what might be described as a weighty tome. What an ingenious way to tell
us everything we need to know about the relationship between this couple!
How many of today's mainstream filmmakers could have come up with such a
simple, economic piece of visual storytelling?
Halfway through Old, I couldn't wait for the movie to be over, but I'd be lying if I said I
wasn't excited for Shyamalan's next movie. If nothing else,
Old serves as a curious sequel to
The Father in which Rufus Sewell gets his comeuppance for mocking
Anthony Hopkins' senility. You'll know what I mean when you see it.
Old is on Netflix UK/ROI now.