Every time that M. Night Shyamalan pushes me out, he pulls me back with fury. Yes, The Last Airbender and After Earth are two of the worst movies ever made. Glass, while adequate, was a masterclass of Shyamalan’s greatest downfalls in writing, storytelling, and letting his superstar casts read some of the strangest lines ever written. Shyamalan is at his best when he doesn’t care. Split works because James McAvoy is the perfect foil to make up for Shyamalan’s dialogue while ideally selling the absurdity on screen. The Visit worked because there were no big stars in a high-concept horror worthy of the Blumhouse name. None of these are perfect, but after two blockbuster disasters, the director started making the types of strange, flawed, ambitious movies that make him solely unique, and Old is a culmination of Shyamalan in everything it does.
Minor Spoilers Ahead
The premise of Old is straight out of Twilight Zone. Based on a Swiss graphic novel called Sandcastle, it features an island where time no longer matters and characters who enter it as six-year-olds leave it as fifty-year-old widowers. If this premise gets you excited, the movie will deliver on its promise.
Old features a combination of recognizable faces, such as Pig and Hereditary’s Alex Wolff and Jojo Rabbit’s Thomasin Mackenzie, but it lives and dies with Shyamalan’s audacity. Say what you want about the robotic dialogue, nonsensical plot points, and Shyamalan’s signature penchant for showing and telling despite every writing instructor in history gunning for the ladder. Shyamalan’s movies often read like the first draft of a script that is never punched up in revisions. At his best, he’s one of the most extraordinary stories visual storytellers in the business. At his worst, the long-winded and heavy-handed shots grow long and uncomfortable. However, while this may read as a criticism of most, it might be Shyamalan’s biggest asset. He doesn’t aim to make the most polished horror movies of all time. He seeks to show his vision to the world.
Everyone in Shyamalan movies talks like M. Night Shyamalan. Everyone from the five-year-old children to a rapper named Mid-Size Sedan speaks as though they’re constantly writing prose about what’s happening right in front of them. Everyone asks questions, few questions get answered, and it all leads to a thrilling finale that’s both brilliant and easy to poke holes in at the same time.
Old is less a movie and more a collection of Shyamalan’s greatest hits. The actors range from shockingly good to downright terrible, yet it works effectively because the director almost always knows his self-given assignment. That’s the key to many of his greatest films. When Shyamalan knows exactly what he’s making, gets a cast and crew who’s on board with his vision, and trusts himself to give audiences a new, unique experience, he shows why he so effectively toes the line between a behind-the-camera Nicolas Cage, an auteur with a fingerprint on nearly every aspect of the film, and a long-form Twilight Zone fan-fiction writer. He’s not the best filmmaker, screenwriter, actor, or producer, but he’s good at being M. Night Shyamalan.
Old’s plot takes a dozen classic tropes, and both pay tribute to them and knocks them on their sides. It’s Lost by way of Fantasy Island by way of Click by way of Boyhood through Lord of the Flies. However, it’s a well-put-together film that only Shyamalan could have made so entertaining despite such an absurd premise and execution.
Mackenzie, Wolff, Aaron Pierre, Lost alum Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird help give the film some much-needed chops while Vicky Krieps and Gael Garcia Bernal add an air of sweetness that bypasses some of the clunky lines they’re forced to say aloud. Everyone else is a chaotic smorgasbord of hammy acting, confusing line readings, awkward humor, and the exact type of melodrama that lets the film’s absurdly violent PG-13 rating shine in ways it has no business of d. Then, there’s Rufus Sewell.
Rufus Sewell has shown time and time again that he can act alongside several of the biggest names in Hollywood and Television, but he’s also shown how well he can chew scenery. This is not The Man in the High Castle. This is Sewell summoning every hamfisted performance of the last fifty years, filtering them through a soap opera cadence, and giving us a performance that elevates the film to a camp classic. Sewell’s Charles is an affluent doctor with an attractive, younger wife, a child he is not always there for, and a mother with whom he shares a Freudian bond.
Sewell’s commitment to making every action he performs on screen uncomfortable goes wonderfully alongside a filmmaker who thrives doing just that. The performance is more likely to garner a Razzy than an Oscar, but Sewell gives it everything it needs and then some, and for that, we should be grateful that we saw it.
Shyamalan’s brand of horror is a testament to the genre’s versatility. Films like Signs and The Village work because of jump scares, while Split and The Sixth Sense worked because of the psychological horror behind the hauntings. Furthermore, Shyamalan’s role as a character who spends most of the film recording the suffering of his characters, and you see an air of self-awareness that many may not offer him. Here, we get a little bit of everything with a healthy dose of what made The Happening one of the 21st-centuries quintessential masterpieces of ironic enjoyment.
Old is a remarkably dark movie in which children have children, several characters die, both young and old, and the gore is ramped up to the exact breaking point it needs to hit before getting the dreaded R-Rating. I heard that it has one of the best kills ever, and when I left, I realized that two or three meets that metric.
Is it a polished movie with nuanced takes on living life before it is too late? No. Does its ultimate twist–less a twist and more an explanation–hold the satire-laden weight of a Get Out? Absolutely not. Does Shyamalan still knock it out of the park? Absolutely.
Old is a tailor-made film for those stuck by Shyamalan through the Sixth Sense and After Earth alike. It’s all his flaws on full display that are made into triumphs right before our eyes. Say what you want about Mr. Shyamalan, but the man knows what his audience wants, and unlike more commercially inclined names in the industry, he knows how to deliver it to them with pizazz and style.Blumhouse name
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