After concluding his Eastrail 177 Trilogy in 2019, writer-director M. Night Shyamalan returns to the world of comics with a loose adaptation Swiss comic “Sandcastle” by writer Pierre Oscar Levy and artist Frederik Peeters transforming their comic into a new film called Old. Perhaps the biggest twist of the film is there isn’t really one. The core of the film is represented in the film’s trailers. There is an explanation as the film concludes but it isn’t a revelation that suddenly alters what you have watched or reframe it on a second viewing the way the ring in The Sixth Sense did. Without the need for a sudden swerve, Shyamalan instead creates the space for himself to make thriller that feels akin to the claustrophobia of “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”
With this being a Shyamalan film and one that is easily summed up in the trailers, discussing the plot isn’t all that useful. The basic plot of the film exists to support the creation an affective mood of anxiety. If you haven’t watched the trailers, Old follows a group of vacationers at a tropical resort who are sent to a special private beach. Once the group is on the beach, they realize they cannot leave, blacking out each time they attempt to leave. That becomes more of a concern when they begin to realize that something on the beach is causing them to rapidly age. While this is achieved in the adult characters through a mixture of framing, make up, and other techniques, it is most noticeable with the child characters who go through 2-3 different actors as they age up.
With the core premise of the film being readily apparent to the viewer, it does make the opening act of the film a tad tedious. It’s like waiting for the slasher to strike or disaster to happen, the movie doesn’t really “begin” until that occurs. That tedium though in retrospect is kind of the point of the film, it’s the monotonous time we don’t really appreciate. Shyamalan’s table setting could’ve been a bit more bearable if the scripting was better. Shyamalan has rarely been a good writer of dialogue and there are some tin eared moments throughout. Some of these moments are redeemed when mixed with the delivery of some of the child actors who make it read as appropriately childlike. As the film pushes everyone to the mysterious beach there isn’t much time to exposit characters outside the main family in a meaningful way. This is a choice that makes the cast less distinct or memorable and often reduces them to their profession, but also opens room for them to reveal themselves in small moments as everything occurs on the beach. It also has the effect of placing thew viewer in the same position of the Cappa played by Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, and the various actors who play their rapidly aging children, who have to figure out who everyone else and why they are.
Once on the beach “Old” kicks into gear for the next about the next 60 minutes as Shyamalan creates an anxious thriller. That anxiety takes on many forms, aging, the unknown, death and so on. That feeling permeates throughout the beach as parents frantically yell for their children or question what is going on. Early on there is repeated talk of it being some viral infection as the cause. The film was produced during COVID-19 pandemic in the Dominican Republic under a bubble conditions. Of all the films I’ve watched during this past year and a half Old best captures the anxious feelings that swirled around in me during in the weeks after March 11, 2020. Those feelings never really go away only reducing to a gentle simmer before suddenly boiling up again at some agita. The beach keeps a similar structure of having moments boiling over and reducing to a simmer, but then suddenly a body appears, and that sense of stability comes crashing down.
The verbal cues and pained shouts may give off an anxious tone, but it’s how the rest of the medium of film is marshalled that creates and sustains that emotion. It becomes the confluence of everything working and bouncing off one another. The way editor Brett Reed plays on Shyamalan’s emphasis on the natural world as a motif to ironically turn the beautiful setting slowly into something more freighting. One minute they’re on the beach and its paradise and 15 minutes later it is like the Ocean is angry and threatening to come and kill them itself.
Continued belowShyamalan has never been one to really show it all, it’s one-part artful dodging one part cash conscious filmmaking. Despite all the anxiety that is present film never devolves into out and out horror the film is more interested in creating tension. Of the many deaths that occur most are off screen; bodies are left similarly out of frame. There’s only two real gruesome ones and they come towards the end. Often the camera is the POV of the object forcing the audience to imagine what they’re seeing. This mode of visual depiction also allows him to skirt around the awkward issues raised of adult actors playing teenagers in bathing suits that increasingly don’t fit.
Not showing everything also forces him to use the medium to cue the viewer in subtler ways, like using the sound mix to tell the viewer that something wrapped in a towel has already turned to bones. Or to mark the aging process by showing how someone comes to understand they’ve lost the hearing in one of their ears in a series of pans. Old squeezes every bit of juice it can out of the premise and the ways it can be represented to the viewer.
In between moments of tension boiling over, sentimentality is allowed to come through in these small moments. A couple reconciles and forgives one another’s petty transgressions. Or they just sit together in their old age on the beach staring at the stars. If the script had drawn out these characters more these simple moments wouldn’t have been nearly as effective. With little else, it forces you to appreciate the little things. Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps both do a good job of giving their characters marriage a lived-in feel even if the specifics of what is troubling them are only hinted at.
As is often the case with his movies and these kinds of movies specifically, there is an urge to Midichlorian the situation. The script does a good job of laying out some basic assumed ground rules that allow the film to function. I wouldn’t pick at them too much; it’d be missing the emotional point the film is trying to make. Does it waffle on the maturity/mental age of the children at times? A bit, but there’s also a point to be made about the children-adults ability to remember to still be a kid and enjoy the little things even as everything around them is so rapidly changing.
Old is a simple and effective mood piece the ways it uses film to tell its story is more interesting and engaging than the film itself. As a piece of filmmaking, it might be director M. Night Shyamalan’s most effective. It certainly is his most affective film in years.
