Old: Neon NZ Film Review

There's a kernel of a good intriguing mystery in M Night Shyamalan's latest, Old.

But it's so crushed down by appallingly stilted dialogue and badly written characters that it makes it hard to appreciate the elements that could help it work.

Essentially a threadbare story of a disaparate group of travellers who win a trip to an exotic island via the internet only to find themselves on a beach where they age prematurely, Shyamalan's tale has some groundwork in a Covid-19 world and a "stop to smell the roses" mentality.

Bernal and Krieps are Guy and Prisca, a married couple on the verge of splitting, and one last family holiday with their young kids. Offered the chance to go to a secluded beach at the resort owner's insistence ("It's our little secret") the family finds themselves paired with Rufus Sewell's doctor and trophy wife, elderly mother and young child. 

But when a body washes up on the shores of the beach, the group decides to escape - only to find to their horror, they're trapped. And things get more complicated when their children age suddenly and inexplicably  before their eyes....

It's hard to love Old when characters talk in ways that no real humans do.

Whether it's exposition-heavy mumbo jumbo or talking around the plot holes, the growing mass of hysterical babble dropping from a talented cast's lips seems like something that should have been scrapped at a scripting phase.

Shyamalan is great at making the everyday seem unsettling.

This time he uses shots of waves, innocuous-seeming rocks and swaying palm trees to convey a sense of dread, their beauty entrenched in a feeling of unsettling calm.

And by using tracking shots moving left to right, passing by characters on the beach, he builds a sense of uncertainty over what will be in frame next when the camera moves back. It's much more effective than the human elements of the film which just alienates you from the characters, rather than caring about their collective fates.

Whereas the graphic novel Sandcastle had a more ambiguous ending, Shyamalan's massive information dump over what the reason for the beach is proves to be a real damp squib that can't stick the patented Shyamalan twist raison d'etre. It does have to be said though that the grey area the end inhabits is a welcome distraction to the mediocrity that has transpired.

There may be themes of being forced to come to terms with yourself, and to examine your past and future (as emphasised by repeated dialogue early on over living in the past, stop wishing the future away etc), but the empathy to do so with the characters is really lost in proceedings.

Old may age its protagonists throughout, but you'll leave the cinema certainly older, but none the wiser as to how Shyamalan keeps trying to pull rabbits out of the hat that never quite live upto the calibre of the surprise of the Sixth Sense and Signs from his own back catalogue.