It’s genuinely astonishing to me that, in the 100-plus years of modern Hollywood filmmaking, no one has attempted to make a wide-release horror film with a premise like M. Night Shyamalan’s Old, an effective and deeply unnerving work of existential terror that, for 80-some minutes of its runtime, holds its own with the highlight reel of the oft-maligned-yet-oft-masterful career of its director. Fitted with the kind of absurdist premise normally suited for black-box theater than Universal’s summer slate, Old devises a scenario so simple and yet so smart that it can’t help but creep one the fuck out. What if you found yourself in a situation where you — and those you love — were aging so rapidly that you all lived the rest of your natural lives within a single day?
That’s the mess that a group of tourists finds themselves in, lured to a mystical cove by the resort they’re all staying at — the views are incredible, and the water’s full of minerals! — only to find that it was a one-way trip. Our protagonist family is comprised of Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), a husband-and-wife whose relationship is on the rocks thanks to a whole host of reasons, and they’re at this resort to provide their children, 11-year-old Maddox (played at various points by Alex Swinton, Thomasin McKenzie, and a third actor) and six-year-old Trent (Nolan River, Luca Faustino Rodriguez, Alex Wolff, and a fourth actor). But others are on the island as well, including a surgeon (Rufus Sewell, at his most Terrence Stamp), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant), his influencer wife (Abbey Lee), and their daughter (Mikayla Fisher and Eliza Scanlan); a couple (Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird), and a rapper (Aaron Pierre), whose moniker is one of the best laugh lines in the film, so I won’t spoil that for you.
Things seem a little normal at first, at least. Aside from wondering why the hotel gave them so much food, it seems just a pleasant day at the beach for the families, though they begin to notice odd little things — there’s no fish in the ocean, and there’s a whole bunch of discarded junk and rusted silverware from the hotel in a sand dune near the cliffs that surround the cove — before the children start shooting up in size and everyone realizes the dire nature of their situation. Like any good Lord of the Flies scenario, order begins to collapse, and the cove’s inhabitants begin to fight among themselves, discovering, in part, that their wounds heal fast when cut, and that, if they try to leave, they’ll find themselves steered back towards the beach by some mystical force. The kids are the source of much of the horror — an unplanned pregnancy goes haywire in a truly horrific way — but the adults get their fair share of torment as well, though it’s in somewhat of a less visceral way. Guy develops cataracts and Prisca begins to lose her hearing, and things become more existentially panicking rather than shocking for a bit before the film unleashes two of the most gnarly deaths I have ever seen in a PG-13 film. There is one involving bones that is just downright unpleasant and awesome as hell, brilliantly executed without all the snapping and popping foley effects that I’ve come to associate with scenes of its ilk.
Once Old kicks into high gear, Shyamalan seems keen to remind you of why he was the face of accessible and mainstream horror in the early aughts (I’d argue the streak ended when he went straight fantasy with Lady in the Water, but everything through The Village holds up quite well nowadays). His sense of pacing is phenomenal — it’s not pedal-to-the-metal, as he gives you enough time to recover between scenes, but it is only drawn out enough to provide just enough color that we stay invested in these characters, no matter how thinly sketched they may be, though archetypes work well as shorthand in situations like this. His specific PG-13 concessions are handled with a genuine grace that somehow manages to be more effective than if we saw any of its worst moments unfold in front of us, with the hints of hideous tragedy serving us better than any glimpses of gore could be (there’s a moment where a side of a towel is slightly lifted to reveal bone and dust that is incredibly effective and sad, especially compared to how poorly it could have been handled). His actors do a swell job managing the pace and adjusting to their performances to the ticking clock implanted at the heart of the narrative, with Wolff, McKenzie, and Sewell being standouts. The first two manage to keep the threads established by their younger actors alive and well in their performances as their older counterparts, and Sewell’s calm yet unhinged performance is stylized while being believably upsetting.
The problems only come when Shyamalan loses faith in his audience’s ability to roll with the bitter punches, perhaps due to their own lack of faith in the director’s third-act storytelling, which comes in two scenes that bookend that stretch of brilliance. The first is a prologue set at the resort, where we’re introduced to all of our characters in their natural habitats, and the second is the film’s ending, accompanied by a twist so hoary and goofy that it’s nearly audacious enough to work, but the pair are so poorly written and executed on-screen that they draw attention to the film’s weaknesses overall. Shyamalan’s a solid filmmaker and an ideas guy, whose ability to follow through on the promises of his premises is well-renowned, but he often struggles scene-to-scene with things like dialogue and tonal shifts, and those issues are highlighted in those two segments. The opening scenes are sunk by his tin-eared conversation, and the film’s twist-and-ending are so tonally jarring (and poorly transitioned to) that it feels like a betrayal of Old‘s emotional core. Worse, it’s easy to imagine a more effective and painful film without them (and it’s not like Shyamalan is inexperienced with true, cynical darkness, given Glass), as vestigial elements from its graphic novel source material, perhaps, that could have been shed with a little more evolution like a prehensile tail.
But I only say these things to highlight just how brilliant much of Old really is, especially for those anxious about aging or concerned with how speedy the passage of time is starting to seem for them. It’s easy to visualize a gaggle of teens having the opposite reaction than the older folks around them at a Friday night screening, jeering and shouting at the screen, laughing and yukking it up on the drive home, taking corners a little too fast, or dropping a roach in their lap, coming inches away from the end of their own respective playthroughs of the Chutes-and-Ladders board we call “conscious existence” without ever realizing how close they were to oblivion. What Shymalan does so well here is to draw attention to those moments, and how they speed past us, until, ultimately, ashes begat ashes, and we all fall down.