A Reel Review: OLD

M. Night Shyamalan, the once-heralded director of hits such as THE SIXTH SENSE (1999), and SIGNS (2002), has certainly taken his fair share of socks on the jaw in the last 15 years. One of the unfair blows he takes is the thought that his movies should be judged by the expected “twist” ending; if the twist is not a mind-blower, then the movie is a dud. This is true to an extent, because there’s more to a film than just a twist…but at the same time…M. Night has a tendency to pack much of his stories into that final reveal. 

 

Married couple Guy and Prisca (Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps), book a vacation to a tropical resort with their children Trent (Nolan River), and Maddox (Alexa Swinton). They are encouraged to visit a private beach, where, along with a few other couples and vacationers, discover that the beach is making them all age rapidly. 

 

Loosely based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, OLD is a closed-quarters horror-thriller where rapid aging brings about terror and fascination. The kids become teens within hours, and the adults lose their eyesight, hearing, and find their pre-existing medical conditions also advancing. It’s a mish-mash of science and fantasy, with the film often going out of its way to stop the proceedings to make sure what is happening is explained. 

 

OLD seems to take a page out of the closed-quarters classic film 12 ANGRY MEN (1957) in isolating people of all walks of life and letting conflict do its thing. The group ranges from a famous rapper, a doctor with mental issues, and a woman with epilepsy. The situation generates a lot of bickering between them all, which doesn’t get as annoying as it could have. M. Night seems to have a grasp on the human condition in how people react to extraordinary circumstances, and the cast carries it all very well. 

 

OLD may ultimately land as M. Night’s best-shot film. His fluid camera movement hides and reveals things in clever ways, and the beach, ocean, and surroundings look gorgeous. He generates some genuine horrific moments and some excellent scares. Some of his dialogue is clunky and too on-the-nose (I can’t wait to hear you sing when you’re older, I have a spare bathing suit in my bag), which exists to foreshadow events and to explain away rapidly growing kids. 

 

The cast overall does very good work. Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps are excellent, but the film is stolen by Thomasin McKenzie, who plays Maddox as a pre-teen. 

 

So let’s talk about that twist. It isn’t a twist as much as a reveal; just a simple pull-back of the curtain to see the wizard pulling all the levers. It makes sense, and any possible hole in the concept is filled in, even if the characters have to blurt it out. It isn’t a mind-blower, but it works. But OLD does stumble in the final five minutes; there was a natural, easy spot to end the film, but M. Night hangs around for what seems like endless minutes over-explaining and over-working to wrap things up. There is little for the audience to fill in for themselves, and one has to wonder if the Twitter-age of needing everything spelled out in a road-map had an influence. In this case, it isn’t the twist that deducts points for M. Night, but what happens after. OLD is a neat little film that just needed to trust its audience more. 

 

BOTTOM LINE: Rent it