Movie Review: M Night Shyamalan's 'Old' (Spoiler Review)

Old stars Vicky Krieps and Gael Garcia Bernal as Prisca and Guy Capps, a married couple on the rocks. Prisca and Guy are approaching a separation just as Prisca is dealing with a a potentially cancerous tumor and the potential of an early death. The two have won an all expenses paid trip to an island paradise via a contest they weren’t even aware they were part of. So, they pack up themselves and their two kids, daughter Maddox 11, and son Trent 6.

Once they arrive on the island the family is approached by the man who runs the resort they are staying at. The resort owner offers the family an added bonus for their trip. There is a beach that isn’t on any of the local maps. This gorgeous beach is limited only to the guests of this resort and only to guests handpicked by the resort owner. Mom and Dad are flattered to be chosen and the following day, they and their two kids, leave for this quiet beach spot along with a few other guests also chosen specifically for the honor of enjoying this private beach.

Once on the beach, things begin to get weird. First a body washes up as one of the kids is swimming. Intending to contact authorities, one of the other guests tries to leave the beach only to wake up back on the beach having fallen unconscious. Strangest of all, the kids are having odd symptoms. For reasons no one can understand, the children are growing at an accelerated rate. They are aging at a rate of a year for every half hour on the island. The same is happening to all of the adults but at a slightly different rate. Everyone is getting older fast and they must figure out how to get off this beach before they die from old age.

So, that’s where the plot stands and this being an M Night Shyamalan movie, there is a twist at the end. I am going to have to reveal that twist in order to explain why Shyamalan’s work is so strained and its metaphor is so obvious to the point of being annoying. For those that still want to see Old, come back to this review after seeing it. Those of you leaving here, I will tell you that I don’t care for Old and I don’t feel it is worth your precious time to see it but I understand and I commend your desire to have an open mind and give the movie a chance. Come back after you see it and we will compare notes.

The twist of Old is that each of the families selected to win this contest and to go to this private beach have a member of their family who is suffering from a life threatening affliction. Vicky Crieps’ Prisca has cancer, Rufus Sewell plays a doctor battling dementia, Nikki Amuka Bird’s character suffers from epilepsy which can bring on life threatening seizures. Each was chosen because a secret scientific cabal looked into their pharmacy records and then used the pharmacy as a front for their fake vacation contest.

Each of the families on this trip were contest winners who were then offered this private beach experience. The beach has a unique frequency that causes people to age rapidly but the secret scientific cabal is also giving them experimental drugs in order to cure their ailments. Everyone on the beach will die but if they die from old age this is an indication that the scientists have cured their illness. The company can then patent the medicine that cured them and make millions of dollars.

So what is the metaphor at play? It actually has nothing to do with pharmaceuticals, the greed of an economy built on human suffering or even the horror of being a victim of an unwitting experiment. Rather, Old is a movie about the movies. Shyamalan uses himself and his actors to comment upon the grinding, churning, greedy, machine that is the Hollywood studio system. This will take some explaining, so here we go.

As the experiment on the beach plays out, M Night Shyamalan himself plays a character who is filming all of the action on the beach. Shyamalan takes care to cast himself specifically as the director for hire for an experiment that he’s been told will potentially change the world. The secret scientists he’s working for are a representation of greedy studios eager to capitalize on the suffering of others for the goal of a profit while trying to fool themselves and others that they are artists with a higher calling than mere profit.

The people on the beach are those that Hollywood chews up and spits out in pursuit of profit. They’re deaths are justified by a notion of a higher purpose, great art, but the reality is a business that uses people until they’ve squeezed the life out of them and then abandons them, callously disregarding their existence as they outlive their usefulness to the moneymaking endeavor in a society where the media foments the beginning and ending of a career at a faster and faster rate.

That, as an idea, is not a bad thing. There are many movies about the movies, both high minded and cynical. There is certainly nothing wrong with criticizing Hollywood executives for the deceit they rend in pursuit of profit, the lies they tell themselves about creating art when they are really creating commerce. These are noble criticisms but Shyamalan presents them in the most obvious, condescending, and ham-fisted manner imaginable.

The reveal of Shyamalan as the ‘director’ for the experiment, the person filming it, creates the metaphor. It becomes obvious what Shyamalan’s point is from that point on. If that were the only touch Shyamalan gave to this meta-narrative it might work but he can’t help but overdo it. He disrespects the audience by assuming we aren’t smart enough to understand his meta-narrative, so he has to double down and underline the point using his actors and his showy camera work.

An inescapable aspect of Old is the way Shyamalan directs his actors. You don’t have to be a film critic to notice the many moments where actors are being directed specifically to over act, over enunciate, to simply add extra energy and emotion to their performance to the point that it breaks the fourth wall. Shyamalan does this with intent in Old. He wants his actors to go to theatrical lengths to expose the artifice of their own performance and thus underline said artifice in service of the meta-narrative.

When the actors overplay the emotion of the moment you are reminded that you are at a movie and that’s the point. Old is a movie about the movies, it’s a critique of the Hollywood filmmaking system and by directing his actors to overact it underlines the metaphor over and over and over and over again. The plot is merely a marketing campaign, a gimmick to get you into the theater. Once you're there, it becomes about underscoring the meta-narrative. This extends to Shyamalan's camera which floats and whirls and rarely lingers long enough for the emotion of a moment to settle in. Were you to begin to identify emotionally with the characters you might miss Shyamalan's brilliant meta-narrative about the inherent greed and avarice of Hollywood's mercenary approach to filmmaking.

You are not allowed to forget that you are watching a movie when you are watching Old. The meta-narrative and the constant underlining of the meta-narrative keeps elbowing you in the ribs to remind you of how clever it all is. You’re constantly being reminded of watching a movie with a Shyamalan twist and being kept at arm's length from connecting with these characters because what they are going through is not the point. It’s what they represent, the victims of a cruel and callous system, that's what matters to Shyamalan.

The complete lack of subtlety makes Old an obnoxious and exhausting experience. It’s like listening to someone try to make the same point over and over again in the midst of an argument, even after you’ve accepted their point and agreed with them. Shyamalan, and by extension, Old, are an over-served party guest who can’t take ‘I agree with you’ as an answer. Old is a frustrating experience because once the point is made there is still so much more movie to endure and no way of changing the subject other than walking out.

Before I finish, a good example of the 'look at me' brand of M Night Shyamalan comes in the form of a character played by actor Aaron Pierre. Pierre plays a famous rap star with a deadly disease who ends up on the Old beach. His rap name is 'Mid Sized Sedan.' Is this meant as satire? Is it intended to be funny? Whatever it was meant to be, it breaks the fourth wall in that typically overwrought Shyamalan way. It's such a bad name that you laugh and you cringe at it. It's hard to decide whether you are laughing with or at this bizarre character name. It's also another obvious attempt by Shyamalan to expose the artifice of Old. You hear Mid Sized Sedan as someone's name and you are once again knocked out of the movie, you're left reeling by the sheer stupidity of such a choice as Mid Sized Sedan and your left confused and frustrated by it. More importantly, you remember you are watching a movie.

M Night Shyamalan didn't write the screenplay for Old and he appears openly contemptuous of the script in how he directs the actors to over play ever line and whirls his camera around in highly directorial fashion that calls attention to itself as direction. The name Mid Sized Sedan is a meta joke on what he thinks Hollywood thinks is a real rap name. It's a meta-joke inside a meta-narrative. It's also yet another example of Shyamalan exaggerating his point, underlining the soullessness of Hollywood movies and the phoniness of the Hollywood style screenplay by committee. But Shyamalan isn't on our side. He may be trying to sneak a meta-narrative critique past Hollywood studio executives but in his flailing attempt at meta-narrative he exposes himself as a filmmaker who lacks the artfulness to craft such a critique well. He ends up creating a middling, muddled meta-narrative that he believes is high art while we roll our eyes at his phony attempt to identify and speak on our behalf.