With Old, M. Night Shyamalan reclaims the title as our biggest doozy of a filmmaker. After 2008’s The Happening—his biggest doozy of a film and his most ridiculed—the writer-director retreated to studio science-fiction (After Earth), no-frills horror (The Visit), and his own, comic book-inspired Shyamalaniverse (Split, Glass). Old is vintage M. Night: a high concept brought ever higher by a filmmaker apparently incapable of second-guessing himself.
The idea this time? While on a resort vacation, a fragile family of four take a day trip, along with a handful of other guests, to a remote, secluded beach. It isn’t long before they all realize that, for mysterious reasons that are only slowly revealed, the beach is causing their bodies to age rapidly—at the rate of a couple of years every hour. Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps play the main parents, who watch their children quickly grow from Alexa Swinton and Nolan River to Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff.
Narratively, Old plunges headfirst into ludicrousness, with one crisis piling on top of another while the characters stand around debating theories and plans of action. (The true Shyama-bomb involves a pregnancy twist I find harder to wrap my mind around than the virgin birth.)
And yet, the camerawork is consistently clever, especially during the first reveal of the kids’ inexplicable growth. One child’s forehead obscures the screen at front left, in focused close-up, while the others’ bodies are blurry in the background (though clearly bigger). Then we hear their altered voices, sending a chill down your spine even if you already know the film’s basic plot.
It’s that sort of stuff that keeps me coming back to Shyamalan, as well as his ability—in spite of the silliness swirling about—to nail a truly emotional moment. Here, it comes toward the end of the film, when Bernal and Krieps have aged to the point of diminished sight, hearing, and memory. Holding each other, they both confess to having forgotten the domestic strife that they sought to escape with this trip. Instead, they’re content in the moment, together in the way of couples who have spent decades weathering many storms. Old gets goofy again before it’s over, but for that instance the movie makes the provocative suggestion that mortality isn’t something we should seek to escape, but maybe embrace.
