Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Ken Leung, Thomasin McKenzie
Rated PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language
Runtime: 1 hour 48 minutes
In theaters July 23

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, The Red Herring

For this review, I need to own my bias up front. I am something of a Shyamalan apologist. While I, too, faltered from the path (I only caught up with The Village a few years ago), I am always rooting for my fellow Philly suburbanite to succeed. Glass made my top 15 in 2019, and I wrote a long piece unpacking what I loved about it. So when I say Old is a misfire, albeit an interesting one, that’s coming from a place of love and not from those who seem to enjoy tearing down this filmmaker. Also, I won’t spoil anything that isn’t already in the trailers for the film. So if you want to go in completely blind, you’ve been warned. 

Old has a very fun high concept: what if there was a place where people aged rapidly? What would that experience be like? Set it on a secluded beach on a beautiful tropical island that caters to wealthy tourists, and you’ve got a recipe to explore aging in all kinds of ways. Shyamalan is not a subtle filmmaker and so there shouldn’t be an expectation for him to handle these things with nuance or anything except naked earnestness. The core fear explored in the film is that of watching your children growing up too quickly, especially while you aren’t looking. What did surprise me is that Old is more of a psychological thriller than a body horror movie, except for a few moments. It’s almost a shame simply because the body horror elements of the film are some of its most harrowing and urgent. 

Maddox (Alexa Swinton/Thomasin McKenzie/Embeth Davidtz) and Trent (Nolan River/Luca Faustino Rodriguez/Alex Wolff/Emun Elliott) age up from children and on the beach, but because the story is focused on the idea of children aging out of sight, there are no moments of sudden bone growth or any puberty-related horrors. It is an interesting choice, especially because the adults on the beach, including their parents (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps), seem to age a bit slower. Unfortunately, the approach that Shyamalan takes to the material never really finds too much emotional traction.

When the characters are on this mysterious beach, Shyamalan is focused on keeping the audience disoriented through the editing and camera choices. In order to obfuscate the passage of time, the film often jumps from one moment to the next, abandoning continuity in order to keep us uncomfortable. Scenes often feel as though they start and end in the middle as the crises of the moment shift from character to character. The camera roams the beach in a similar way, constantly changing the distance between the actors and the lens. The overwhelming sense of the film is one of disorientation and discomfort, and those techniques are effective at creating that sense of atmosphere. 

Where Old flaters is with the character arcs. While Shyamalan packs in plenty of details about them, they are mostly voiced in the kind of conversations that rarely sound natural. While the cast is full of actors I’ve enjoyed in other projects, none of them quite master Shyamalan’s rocky dialogue. Combined with the film’s choppy construction, this leaves limited opportunity for the kinds of character moments that would make the rapid aging land in a visceral sense. 

There is fun to be had with Old, and those seeking an unexpected reveal ought to be satisfied. However, what made Shyamalan a hit writer-director originally was the deep sense of character that grounded ghosts, superheroes, and aliens, giving us fantastical elements that we could experience alongside the characters in those movies. Old feels more like looking in from the outside. All of this may be intentional, and Shyamalan certainly swings hard at some choices that just didn’t connect for me.