Middle-aged by dawn

OLD

2021

Written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan (based on the comic book Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters)

Spoilers: moderate

"Not as bad as Signs or The Happening or Avatar: The Last Airbender or After Earth" is surely not praise, and though the latter half of M. Night Shyamalan's 2010s saw him scoring popular successes for the first time in ages—by the not-entirely-agreeable means of him turning his (presumptively) best movie, Unbreakable, into a whole backyard cinema superhero universe—I personally had so little use for the director's mid-2010s comeback that after Split and Glass I immediately gave up on him once again.  So of course that's when he finally made a good movie—quite possibly his first since Unbreakable, two decades earlier*—a movie where the phrase "not as bad as the average 21st century M. Night Shyamalan movie" would, happily, significantly undersell it.  At a minimum, that film, Old, has done some pivotal work in assuaging the doubts I had about letting myself get fully worked up over this weekend's Trap (obviously the exigence for a review of Old now, three years down the line), because whether or not Trap might look terrific, it does, you know, still bear those fearsome credits, "written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan."  I could go so far as to say that Old has now taken a place in the middle of my mental top ten of movies from 2021, but that's not really that far: it's scarcely greater praise than "better than The Happening, and so forth."  So I'll just call it plain good, with some caveats we'll get to momentarily.

This is not the present consensus on Old, which got some raves back in 2021, but that enthusiasm is largely gone today.  People don't actually seem to like it that much, despite it having made a fair amount of money for a modern day B-picture ($90 million on $18 million, thereby placing a healthy infusion of lucre into our man Shyamalan's coffers thanks to the turn towards self-production his flops made necessary, coming with a new appreciation for fiscal leanness).  And I comprehend the dislike, even if I might say it's not giving it an entirely fair shake as an individual work; but it is, still, an M. Night Shyamalan film.  Working (reputedly loosely) from an existing comic book, a French graphic novel called Sandcastle, probably helps him, but this is a Shyamalan screenplay, so accordingly it's Shyamalan dialogue, and there's even a bit of a return to Shyamalan acting—not such a fall back into bad habits that we can speak of Happening-era flutey idiots again, at least—but Shyamalanesque enough that one of the best, most human-feeling performances in the film comes from M. Night Shyamalan, giving himself a two-scene cameo, which is good mainly on the basis of the laugh-out-loud meta gag the second of those scenes occasions.  Most everyone else is saddled with some combination of unappealing character and undeliverable dialogue.  However, it also has Shyamalan direction, an enormous amount of it, and this, along with an intriguing scenario (and not uniformly bad writing and performances), save it.

That scenario is this: a time beach that makes you old.  It probably didn't have to be a beach (at least two Star Trek shows did it on a spaceship), but a beach is possibly the best place to set it, thanks to the naturally-pretty liminal imagery that's already apt to be turned into a metaphor for life and death, and, more concretely, the states of undress the beach encourages that are going to emphasize the physical changes amongst our cast.  (The latter could've had more done with it, to be sure.  Nobody gets saggy old, unfortunately, and I will chalk this up as one of the film's biggest whiffs, not improbably due to skinflint Shyamalan's unwillingness to spend his own money on digital face replacement or really pronounced waterproof makeup, even if he could technically have afforded either or both.)  So into this scenario walks a number of social units who are not connected, but we learn early on share a secret similarity in that at least one member of every party suffers some medical ailment or another.  Our principal focus is on the Cappa family, mom Prisca (Vicky Krieps), a museum curator, dad Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal), a morbid, avoidant actuary with all the death statistics at his fingertips, tween daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton initially), a pubescent beginning to painfully individuate, and young son Trent (Nolan River initially), who's a heady stew of movie precocity and movie autism that I would adjudicate a failure on both counts except I suspect he just talks like M. Night Shyamalan thinks, and I reluctantly came around to finding him charming enough, because it was either that or not enjoy a third of the movie.

Prisca and Guy have hit the skids in their marriage lately, and are contemplating divorce—Prisca's insistence on it could have something to do with a big tumor developing in her abdomen, but she dismisses that—and so one last vacation for the family while it's still intact would seem to be in order.  And what do you know?  Prisca has just won a luxury vacation to a very exclusive resort, and on their first full day there, the manager nudges them towards an even more exclusive experience, free of charge, and sends them down to a special beach on the other side of the island, surrounded by "special minerals" (actual quote, and is there any scenario, besides mining exploration, that you'd want to be around "special minerals"?).  With them comes another family, the racist, jerkish, and increasingly unhinged doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell), his elderly mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant), his younger wife Chrysta (Abbey Lee), and their young daughter Kara (initially Kylie Begley); later arrives married couple Jarin (Ken Leung), a nurse, and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a therapist; already there is "Mid-Sized Sedan" (Aaron Pierre), a rapper—it's remarkable because Shyamalan seems to fully grasp Stupid White Person Real Given Names like "Maddox**" but found himself entirely lost with Stupid Rapper Stage Names—and his friend (Alejandra Useche), or, rather, what's left of her, because she's already dead, as they realize when Trent discovers her corpse.  That prompts some tension, of course, but strange things are afoot, and gradually, especially as Trent, Maddox, and Kara become entirely different people (Alex Wolff/Emun Elliott, Thomasin McKenzie/Embeth Davidtz, and Mikaya Fischer/Eliza Scanlen, respectively)—why, the former even visibly shifts ethnicities twice—it becomes clear that they're all growing old at an enormously accelerated rate, giving even the youngest of them about a day before senescence and death claims them.  The rest obviously have a shorter span, and they're apparently trapped there.

What's important is to not ask all the stupid questions this scenario will inevitably prompt, but evidently Shyamalan and I disagree on the importance of suspending disbelief, because one of the worst things his screenplay does is ask those stupid questions, which will invariably have stupid answers (I half-wonder if Shyamalan is honestly fucking with us vis-a-vis hair and nails, a moronic literalist "problem" that I would have been vastly more comfortable with the movie never addressing); it's somewhat bound up with a whole damned cast who are a little slow on the uptake, which is a serious aggravation for only about a minute but it's a very salient one, as they forward some awfully goofy science-ish hypotheses for the fact that the kids have all bounced into more-or-less physically mature young adulthood in what amounts to offscreen space.  Like... no, it's a not a fucking virus, idiots, it's basically magic.  (It's extra-aggravating because it's interwoven into an otherwise rather excellent passage of suspense gamesmanship that is extremely aware that this is silly fun—so, you haven't noticed on your own that you've gained two feet of height, kids?—and this is something Shyamalan-the-Director never forgets even if Shyamalan-the-Screenwriter wasn't told, which I find so incredibly strange.)  It's a special case of the element of the film that I expect would improve so much on rewatch, which is the increasing obviousness that it's going to abandon horror-fantasy where the focus is on the rules and results, and tack into actual science fiction obliged to explain the underlying hows and whys, something I was dead certain it would do poorly.  And it is, indeed, a "dumb" explanation in the end (on several levels, including how it throws up its hands about the time beach itself and does in fact say, "it is just magic, I guess"), but it's loopy and unique—even rather funny with its pretenses to regret that only feel half-pretended and its arguments over protocols that it explicitly marks as something like the fiftieth relitigation of the arcane issues at hand—and it likewise, to even better effect, makes use of offscreen occurrence that Shyamalan knows good and well we know happened to stretch things out and impose a very curious mood of longeur onto a sequence where the climax has already happened and we're just waiting for the scaffolding to collapse, itself only a final, forceful manifestation of the whole film's "observational horror" mood.

But I'm skipping ahead, obviously, and there's a lot of obstacles strewn semi-randomly on the way there, not all of which is as apt to be redeemed by good, confident, sometimes counter-intuitive filmmaking.  The first act is practically all an obstacle—"as you know, we're divorcing and I have cancer"—thanks to Shyamalan always being better at doing the big, burly Twilight Zone episode than he is doing a character drama with themes.  (So about the runtime: the big, burly Twilight Zone episode is 90 minutes; the movie as it stands is 108, which speaks for itself.)

As for the latter mode, he has retained a tendency to state character and theme aloud in dialogue, which is just murder on most of the actors playing grown-ups, especially Garcia Bernal and Krieps, who have some magnificent scenes late in the film where they silently grow old together during their quiet dotage on the beach, but have for some reason decided to approach this dialogue as if they aren't actually fluent in English and are reciting each word phonetically.  (The stand-out of the "grown-up" cast is, I guess, Sewell, whose character is the least-enjoyable and worst-conceived—a melange of uniformly negative traits that gets addled by the fact of a cognitive degeneration, and hence a fraught, potentially-interesting, but never-very-fun figure that's been jammed into the smaller corners of a wackadoodle genre film—but he somehow gets the most out of his character of any of them as he pitifully wanders off into his differently-perceived reality.  Amuka-Bird is saddled with the most unmanageable role of the bunch, with "therapy" being the beginning and end of her character and every line of dialogue she utters, so in this case a social satire jammed into the smaller corners of an etc., but of course just coming off obnoxious.)  They're hampered further by how wild the world they've stumbled into is: it's just impossible to care about, or believe they care about, their petty personal shit once they've beheld their kids gain ten years in an afternoon; hence there's a reasonable argument the film's best grown-up character is Chrysta, who really is just a vehicle running directly in a straight line into grotesque disfigurement.

The kids, on the other hand—including the actual children, even, who get away with Shyamalan dialogue and performance better than adults, because you already expect them to be immodulated and blunt, but I especially mean the adult actors playing the children—are by-and-large good, ranging from pretty great with Wolff and McKenzie, who've worked out 6 and 11-year olds responding psychologically and physically to their new bodies very well, to solid enough with Elliott and Davidtz who are still using the 6 and 11 year olds as frames of reference even as the story demands that they be wizened, spiritually, well beyond their chronological ages.  The kids benefit, too, from having the most Twilight Zone material, and from being the only major moving parts still moving when Shyamalan, correctly, commits pretty much entirely to Twilight Zone storytelling in the final third—which, bizarrely (actually quite normally), winds up landing harder emotionally because it means it can suggest or imply what the movie is about, mostly concerns that we don't spend enough time appreciating the present.  The bitter irony there is that it's a movie that's always at its best when it, too, is appreciating the here-and-now problems of time beach rather than any of the shallow backstory problems these losers have brought here with them.

Fortunately, most of the movie actually is doing that, especially once we get out of the first act and get down on the beach and, in short order, three separate terrors stack up simultaneously; the intervals where we're not dealing directly with the beach's curious properties are not infrequent but mercifully brief, and the majority of the story is in fact the "and now this elaboration upon the premise" you'd rightly ask for, getting enough body horror out of the scenario to satisfy, to the point where it's straining against the PG-13 rating and you wish it weren't in the way.  Curiously, the most unnatural nastiness turns out to work the best within the constraints; the one that really needs the R is the most "natural," after a fashion, of all the film's manifold horrors, and even what we see—the movement under the skin—is deeply unnerving in this context, and one imagines that this brief shot was the limit; but then, that it struck into this territory at all is so shocking that the minutes-long lead-up to it feels like its own sick trick, like we're definitely going to be swerving at the last moment.  But Shyamalan pilots us straight into one of the most conceptually horrifying brick walls the scenario could've put up, lacking all mercy whatsoever about any aspect of it; and I admire the guts of it immensely.

But ultimately what's most impressive here, if only because it's more reliable than Shyamalan's brutality, is how much diligence Shyamalan and his DP Michael Gioulakis are putting into their movie, starting with just the difficult prospect of making this sunny day seemingly doom-filled.  But this is a movie of constant movement, possibly a literal manifestation of how time doesn't stop or something a little airless like that, but it works better knowing (and we have a nebulous idea quickly enough) that they're rats in a laboratory experiment being conducted for some as-yet-unknown purpose, so the surveillance of the cast takes on a paranoiac quality.  The anamorphic photography has a nice texture and structure (some don't really like the lens distortion, but I do), and there's (I'd hazard) an effort at narrower aperture settings to achieve some good & proper deep staging when Shayamalan isn't doing gonzo 'Scope close-up two-shots, so that the seemingly highly-limited visual possibilities of a single stretch of beach never even seem in danger of running out; I only kind of wish Shyamalan and Gioulakis more often remembered that the split diopter is a miraculous invention, especially for a lot of these neo-70s two-shots, but hey, they do use at least one. (Meanwhile, if I were to watch it again, I might be able to confirm my suspicion that Shyamalan and editor Brett M. Reed are alternating between longer takes and jagged, disaggregating cutting based on the rationale of the scene, whether it's "Twilight Zone" or "character drama," respectively, though as noted these modes bleed together with the kids; whatever else, Reed's doing a world-class job with the chaotic pile-up of incident that kicks off the second act and withholds a visual acknowledgment of the children's change for minutes longer than is rationally possible, resting a surprising amount of it on one of the most narratively-useful leering ass shots you've ever seen.)

What it made me think of most of all was Cast Away,*** and the "indifferent eye of God" midsection of that film, even if this is more narratively tethered and perhaps it occurs to me only because of the similarities of the settings; but that fits the grander notion of the film, which is the dumb-if-you-say-it-aloud idea that this is life, after all.  Haven't we all been thrown down on a pile of sand with a keen awareness of our impending decrepitude and death?  The impassivity of so much of the film's construction gets closer to making that idea artful than anything else.  In any case, it's marvelously expressive, in absolute love with circular pans and lateral dollies and carefully-chosen shot scales, sometimes just "I'm making a preposterous supernatural thriller as hard as anyone possibly could," which is of course a pleasure in itself, and sometimes selling the emotional stakes far better than the screenplay does: there's a dolly towards the end that outruns Krieg, and then dollies back, reluctantly conceding that she's important, that would've made me mist up, at least if all the dialogue hadn't made me resistant to that notion.  There's a better movie in Old than the one that exists, but I wouldn't trade the guy who made it just to get rid of the guy who wrote it, so it seems I'm back in Shyamalan's corner, which I guess is what I'd always hoped for, even if it feels itchy and uncomfortable now that I'm here.

Score: 7/10

*I've never seen The Village, Lady In the Water, or The Visit.  As I basically know everything about The Village short of having actually watched it, I have an inkling I'd like that one just fine if I did, contra its reputation; and, in fairness, The Visit is oftentimes alleged to be good.  But you know what?  So were Split and Glass.

**In a context where neither parent is American and hence prone to such exceptionalism, which I probably could let bother me.

***Presumably, it would be a coincidence that this would share a release year with the last good Shyamalan experience I saw.