Holidaying at a beach resort, married pair Prisca Cappa (Vicky Krieps) and Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), along with their two children, find themselves on a secluded beach. At breakfast, a resort staffer suggested they spend their day there, offering the location exclusively to selected guests. A bus shuttle took them there, along with holidaying doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell), his Instagram model wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) and their daughter. At the beach, the two families meet a few others and intend on enjoying a relaxing day in the sun and sand, but all that begins to turn on its head when a swimmer is found drowned and the rate at which our beach dwellers appear to be aging is highly accelerated. Before long, the Cappa and Charles’ children, Maddox, Trent and Kara are nearing adulthood, embodied by actors Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen respectively. There is no way for the group to turn back and the questions become what to do, and what sinister game is this hotel playing at by sending them there. This is an M. Night Shyamalan movie; written and directed – so strap yourselves in, baby!
Unlike some, I really liked Glass. Nah, I mean, I really liked Glass, so my last cinematic Shyamalan experience was a positive one. I’ve been enthusiastic about this movie’s trailer; I love the choice to have our two main adults (or should I say our first two adults) as Europeans, and assuming the location of this horrific beach is somewhere in Europe unlocks a conception for me of a setting that should be an exotic holiday destination for Australians and Americans alike, potentially entangled with a longer cautious and mystic history, that could involve ancient curses from the dark ages. In execution, this movie leaves a lot to be desired, reminiscent of the middle run of schlock in Shyamalan’s career over the genius of his origins. Even from the trailer, I gathered that if anything was going to derail this movie, it’d be the icky notion of a minute-ago three-year-old giving birth, but it’s more than that; robotic characters, terrible dialogue, production mediocrity and more ghoulish occurrences. And all the while, watching this story play out, there’s an added uneasiness because you’re aware that someone did this to these people; the beach resort set this up. Of course, there’s a Shyamalan twist, and knowing why the resort has forsaken these guests is a little cool, but cooler than a random and luckless ‘Twilight Zone style mystery? I think not.
Structurally, Old is not dissimilar to Jordan Peele’s Us; a movie I didn’t love, but at least it did it’s darndest to get us emotionally invested in its family before the supernatural elements kicked in. This movie spends oodles of time with the Cappas before we get to the beach, but what results is a pretty bland and generic-looking vacation. If not already on the hook due to the trailers, I would have seen no indication that anything exciting was about to happen. I guess it’s difficult to give these child characters any personalities that will last, considering they’ll be in their twenties soon, but just give them a hobby or two, so we like them and can connect with them; I remember in Us that the daughter was a runner and the son was timid, and into toys – all I can tell you about these two is that the girl is maybe a little nurturing, and the boy knows about mortgages 🙄 they’re basically wooden blocks. It’s not the actors’ fault; it’s flat dialogue, that’s noticeable from the first scene, where the Cappa family use about four clichés, around time and aging, with about as much elegance as a tapdancing hippo. The production just hasn’t taken the time to naturalise its thematic concepts into believable dialogue, that helps us connect with these characters in any way. And the damage of this lack of subtlety doesn’t let up, as by the time our characters are on the beach, it’s like the movie, and certainly the audience from my perspective, is so far ahead of these people in their revelations, that it leaves no way of joining up with them to go on this journey together. It’s a mess.
On top of this, the selected camera techniques compliment the movie maybe once or twice, but they mostly make for a very awkward movie – the framing, cuts off people’s heads as they’re talking, and often opts to show the its subjects faces only partially. I thought there was something wrong with the cinema at times because this couldn’t be on purpose – which is a rare thing; searching for technical difficulties during a screening. This, often close-in, helped get around the practical issue of seeing the children age in between the stages of the movie’s casted actors, I’ll give it that; but that’s a problem that could have been circumnavigated in the moment without jeopardising the style of the entire movie, which even bleeds into the credits. I was also reminded of Lost, when it came to swirling shots of heightened tension from inside the group as they stand in a circle, but even that somehow worked better on Lost; whether it be due to crisper dialogue and acting in scenes that helped sell it, or how, in Old, it’s just painstakingly annoying seeing actors react to something that’s happening on the other side of the circle and having to wait for the camera to slowly plod around for us to get a look at it for ourselves. I laughed when the group adamantly concludes as to why their nails and hair aren’t growing; like, that’s way down the list of problems Shyamalan should have been writing to solve in my book.
Moreover, the notion of Thomasin McKenzie putting on a child-like voice, as seen in the trailer, didn’t appeal to me either, but in the end, I actually think McKenzie ends up making the best of the material she’s given – she’s definitely at least commendable for her one wide-eyed and shocked face that’s been used in promotion. Rufus Sewell as doctor Charles, seemed like he was going to be our most ‘latch-on-able’ character for a short time, but then he starts going on about Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando, before he is flung to the side by the rocks with his own problems. Shyamalan certainly knows how to get the least of out his actors at times (Mark Wahlberg in The Happening or Will Smith in After Earth; which is worse?) and there are a few scenes here that may prove a gift for years ahead – how about Charles and Jarin (Ken Leung) and their total lack of emotion as Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) has her first seizure? Vicky Krieps as Prisca, sure does a lot of dramatic yelling, and I’d much rather be rewatching Abbey Lee eat *spoilers* in The Neon Demon than any cold and distant thing she’s doing here (if you haven’t seen The Neon Demon, do, because not enough people talk about it). Eliza Scanlen is also lacking any charm, where in other performances she’s had it in spades.
In better hands, this concept could have been a poignant commentary on the swiftness of life; ‘like sand through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives’, sort’ve stuff. With better direction, this story could have also been so much more chilling. I even have my doubts on how the math works out in some of these aging scenarios – Prisca says they are aging around a year every half-hour, but I don’t know… on first viewing, I think time does whatever it wants on that beach. I also personally didn’t notice any of the adults showing any signs of aging until around the time Charles goes on a rampage in the dark, and you’d think that gradually aging the actors would have been an essential focus of the movie, to help immerse the audience in its premise – a little greying side-burn here, some deeper wrinkles there. The only bittersweet moment of the movie comes from Prisca and Guy sitting together as old souls, but it’s way too little too late to save this movie from being another hack-job of an admittedly absorbing and engaging idea. Old; more like Shyamalan’s old dirty tricks.
1.5
P.S. I’m just going to write about how dumb the twist ending turns out to be. I think we are supposed to question our preconceptions around the morality of the hotel, as if the ‘ends justify the means’ and since this hotel is saving “millions” of lives through these accelerated tests, maybe they are doing the right thing…? No! I’m sure some people with terminal illnesses somewhere would volunteer for these trials, given the chance to go out on their own terms, and with a chance to turn their misfortune into an opportunity to aid wider society. No need to sacrifice the lives of loving family members really; what’s that about? Does Shyamalan’s character get a jolly out of knocking off work and going down the pub to tell his workmates about how another adolescent couple had a catastrophic hour-long pregnancy again? While he watches through binoculars on his rock? What if the holidaying families say no to the invitation to the quiet beach – ‘we really like the idea Trent on the jet skis, and Maddox is just going to have to suck it up because what we do, we do as a family. Or we might just sun by the pool, and take advantage of the hotel’s fantastic amenities, thank-you’.
The secret science team also celebrate that this trial was a success because Patricia didn’t have a seizure for hours (years) on the beach and was therefore cured. But… she did die of a seizure; a series of them, in fact. And we saw her have a seizure at breakfast, which would have been after her cocktail-on-arrival. I guess she could have been given a second cocktail before making the trip to the beach, but the science team was sure way off with their first concoction, ey? Even if the second solution was instead, deemed to be a mere step in the right direction, you don’t conclude a winning medical formula after one test subject – these medical research professionals need to take a good hard look at themselves! Plus, how is this group even categorised as the same trial when they’re dropped off at different times – I’m talking specifically about rapper ‘Mid-Sized Sedan’ (Aaron Pierre) who could have wigged about the aging anomaly hours before anyone else arrived, and warned anybody else from coming through the rock formations to get help. And as the one scientist points out, about having the mentally-ill subjects jeopardising results by murdering the others; yeah, ya think? A very strange strategy; running a controlled experiment in uncontrollable chaos! And didn’t Guy say that he thought the hotel would know how to make all the guests disappear, so their final location couldn’t be traced back to the hotel? Well, the policeman was able to determine a full list of missing people in under five minutes, and don’t people talk to friends and loved ones to say they’re going on holiday? Give me a break.
I like deciphering plot-holes in a movie; it makes me feel like a big man! But I shouldn’t be able to unravel the whole thing on the car ride home. This movie must be dead on the beach for a couple of hours, because under only a little inspection, it falls apart like dust.
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