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Tripwire Reviews M Night Shyamalan’s Old

Published

5 years ago

July 28, 2021

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Life’s A Beach

Tripwire’s editor-in-chief reviews M Night Shyamalan’s Old, out in cinemas now…

Old
Director: M Night Shyamalan
Stars: Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell

A new M Night Shymalan film used to be a cinematic event. But after his last two films, Split and Glass, which took the story he started way back in Unbreakable in 2000, his career has taken a little bit of a strange course. He made his name as a twist director with films like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and The Village but his two most recent efforts did take him away from that. Old, based on a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, sees him return to twist territory.

A family, Guy and Prisca, played respectively by Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps, are on holiday with their two kids, Maddox and Trent, on an unnamed tropical island. Their trip is turned upside down when they find themselves taken to a secluded beach where they all seem to be ageing at a rapid pace. They are trapped on the beach with fellow hotel guests including doctor Charles (Sewell), his neurotic, much younger wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and their little daughter Kara (Eliza Scanlen) , husband and wife Jarin (Ken Leung) and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Also present on the beach is another hotel guest, rapper Mid-sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre).

Old, probably more than any of his other twist films, feels like a 107 minute episode of the Twilight Zone. Old does try to show us what happens when your life is accelerated over just a few days rather than many decades: meeting others, falling in love, having children and then dying.

There is another twist of sorts which I won’t reveal here which explains the purpose of sending guests off to their doom over the past few years but it doesn’t quite come off.

Old is a decent enough Shyamalan by the numbers and the situation that the group are thrown into is fairly well-handled by the director. Former pretty boy actor Bernal has decent chemistry with his onscreen wife Krieps, last seen in The Phantom Thread. Sewell is suitably manic too as the doctor who can’t cope with the pressure of their situation. It is a little bit theatrical at times which is jarring for the viewer but that was inevitable considering the nature of the situation here.

Old isn’t necessarily a bad film as it does have some decent performances and Shyamalan does manage to keep the drama and tension going throughout, giving the viewer an off-kilter experience. So it is definitely worth a look despite a disappointing end.

Here’s the film’s trailer