Warning: minor spoilers will be included, and by minor spoilers, I mean I try to describe some things while taking many steps around it.
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But the internet has taught me that people take these really seriously and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.
M. Night Shyamalan is a favorite director of mine. I’ve always vibed with his work and found him sympathetic when everyone thought he was a has-been and was making weird racist jokes about him all the time. His run from The Sixth Sense to The Village is one of the strongest runs I think any mainstream director has ever had, I happily stand up for The Happening and After Earth, and from The Visit onwards. After he started self-funding his movies, he’s seems completely reinvigorated, with 2019’s Glass being my favorite film of its year. So given all that, I was probably always gonna be in the tank for Old, an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle. But it still managed to surprise me with just how much I fell for it – Old is the first time in this weird COVID limbo where I walked out of a theater with a skip in my step and a wide smile on my face, and it reminded me of just how much I love movies.
Set in and (mostly) around a luxurious island resort, the film focuses on husband Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps), and their two children, Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River) as they take a much-needed vacation. On the recommendation of the hotel’s manager, they join a few other families on a trip to a remote beach on a nature reserve.
However, shortly after their arrival, they discover a dead body on the beach, and from there they make a few more shocking discoveries, chief among them being that time works differently on the beach. It goes significantly faster, shortening their lives into the events of a single day. Soon, Guy and Prisca’s kids age into young adulthood (and are now played by Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff). With the way they came in leading to them mysteriously blacking out whenever they try leaving through it, everyone must figure a way off the beach before age gets the better of them.
The metaphor at the center of Old is pretty easy to understand: it’s Shyamalan’s take on the fact that his parents, children, and himself are getting older, and him wrestling through his feelings on this through his screenplay. I haven’t read the graphic novel that the film is based on, but knowing the general gist of the story, it’s easy to see why Shyamalan chose to base a movie on it.
And he uses this to stage a number of the most purely unsettling scenes of his whole career. Rarely a moment goes by where something that isn’t terrifying happens before the horror returns – and the best of those moments, featuring a tumor removal and a sped-up pregnancy, had me squeezing my own hands so hard that I won’t be surprised if I wake up with bruises tomorrow morning. Despite this, the film retains a PG-13 rating, mainly through Shyamalan keeping the gore at a minimum and ratcheting up the tension through camera placement and editing. This is simply masterful stuff here.
Speaking of that, Shyamalan once again proves to have a super solid grasp on his craft, both on the page and behind the camera. While many of his visual trademarks that have been around since his earliest days are still at play, Shyamalan is trying something new with his compositions on Old. They’re more off-kilter, with characters often at the extreme edges of the 2.39:1 frame or cut off by it, adding a level of discomfort to the proceedings that just make things seem even more off than they are already. And cinematographer Mike Gioulakis, who previously collaborated with Shyamalan on Split and Glass, shoots it all beautifully, capturing the colors of the settings in a way that made me want to go to the beach in the Dominican Republic the film shot at despite the fact that I am not a beach person. It’s also the first movie Shyamalan has shot on 35MM film since his controversial blockbuster The Last Airbender, and he is clearly relishing the texture and lighting work that only 35MM can deliver in the visuals here.
And as far as his screenplay goes, it’s incredibly economical and as him as can be. M. Night Shyamalan is back on his bullshit, and I am incredibly happy about it. All his weird alien dialogue and corny humor is here, and it rules. But the script also features his talent for character arcs – everything that’s set up in the film is paid off, and while some of it is clunky, every single arc gets resolved exactly the way it should. Not a single word here is wasted, and I have to appreciate that in a landscape where almost every movie is about twenty minutes longer than it should be.
The one problem I do have with the film is that the ending stretches on longer than it should. While I get what Shyamalan was going for, after a while it felt like he was putting a button on a button… on yet another button.
It’s not really a twist — the characters in the movie put together at least the broad strokes of what’s happening to him as it happens — it’s more of an elaboration on their guesses. It’s still pretty strong through a lot of it, but it feels like he was looking for a neater, happier ending than the story maybe should have had.
But wow does the rest of the movie more than make up for it. The thrills are thrilling, the scares are spooky, the moments of levity are funny, and there is an emotional moment right before the climax that almost had me sobbing in my chair. The cast is full of accomplished actors who are exactly on the film’s wavelength, with highlights for me being Aaron Pierre as a rapper who falls under suspicion early on and Abbey Lee as a vain trophy wife whose perfect-on-the-surface life completely falls apart as the film goes on.
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On top of it all, it is absolutely gorgeous – you will not see a better-looking film this summer. Old will not be for everybody, M. Night Shyamalan is too divisive of a director at this point in his career for people to be completely onboard for his brand of film. But for those on his wavelength, Old is a fantastic addition to his filmography, one that leaves me incredibly excited for what his next project is going to be. See it on the largest screen you can.
