Old Movie Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s Film is A Winner Without any Enemy

Director: M. Night Shyamalan

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Alex Wolff, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Eliza Scanlen, Kathleen Chalfant, Gustaf Hammarsten, Thomasin McKenzie, Embeth Davidtz

Ratings: 4/5 (four stars) [yasr_overall_rating size=”large”]

Two years after the release of Glass , and fresh from the direction of Servant (the US series Apple TV +),  M. Night Shyamalan  returns with a dark and disturbing thriller , the result of the collaboration with  Universal and defined via Skype in the course of twelve long weeks during the Covid-19 pandemic. With Old , in cinemas from 21 July 2021, the director, screenwriter and producer ventures into a new style , distancing himself from the premises of the masterpiece The Sixth Sense (1999) as much as from those of more recent works such as The Visit (2015) and starts a new era of his filmic poetics, shaping, in the awareness of the medium, an insurmountable microcosm of panic and obsession.

The Review and Story Recap

And after all it is a different film from the classic thriller or horror because it is a film without a villain, without any real villain, but with a sense of impending danger, of fear, of uncertainty that comes from something superior and uncontrollable. In this sense, Old approaches another Shyamalan film, one of his less fortunate ones, And the day came . Even in that case we are talking about a thriller without a real enemy, if not a natural element, such as a neurotoxin produced by plants. Nature there, time here. Either way he is an enemy that cannot be fought.

Old is a great show, almost two hours long, that thrives on constant tension, worthy of the best Shyamalan. The pace is higher than that of his classic films with a suspended atmosphere, and is in theory closer to that of his later works. The sense of mystery and that heavenly place that suddenly becomes a nightmare make us think also of Lost, even if the narrative is very different. We are a little sorry that Shyamalan, at times, points on some sensational, gruesome, frightening facts, when the mere passing of time and what it entailed ensured the right tension to the story. In some moments it is as if the director does not trust the story he has in his hand, already strong in itself, and wants to add some elements to make it exciting. But the result is to weigh down the story. Just as some explanations weigh it down, some too didactic moments (including the continuous repetition of the work that the characters do) of a screenplay that, in any case, exploits all the holds that the rapid passage of time offers.

In this sense, Old is faithful to the graphic novel it is based on, Sand Castle, but up to a certain point. The story is that. Shyamalan shuffles the cards a bit between the two main families and some secondary characters, without affecting the story. And, as mentioned, he adds some dangerous and sensational events to try to give more fear and suspense to a story that perhaps did not need it. But the most important novelty it brings to the story is to show the resort, and therefore the before and after of what happens on the beach. The graphic novel, in fact, begins and ends there, on the beach, without giving too many answers, but finding its meaning in the passage of time. Shyamalan instead creates the premises of the story (accentuating the psychologies of the characters, and this is a positive thing) and closes it with one of his twist endings.. Less shocking than usual, of course, because basically announced several times during the film. So you can watch Old while thinking of two films in one. The first, if you like, opens and closes on the beach, ends with the arrival of the night and with the sand castle the next morning. It is an existential film, about the passage of time, but also about how time can sometimes heal wounds and smooth out differences. It is a film that has its own meaning. With the setting, the resort, the before and after, Old becomes a film closer to the thriller that is contracted to M. Night Shyamalan. It is a story that gives answers and in which the knots come to a head. But that doesn’t really add much to the sense of the film.

The desert island, a paradisiacal reality par excellence, closes its corridors, lets its unsuspecting explorers enter to close behind them without the possibility of climbing. Shyamalan is a demiurge and exterminating angel (1962, Luis Buñuel), systematic in his claim to violate the unbelievable in order to give it a rational explanation. The pawns of the game are none other than its actors, born, raised, extinct even before having lived, guinea pigs of a project that betrays the morals on the skin of its victims. For this reason the staging of the drama divide et impera , because it takes root in depth on the natural, congenital, wholly human fear of senility, of the rapid succession of a time that forgives or concedes nothing to those who believe they are dominating it, dominated instead without respite. Shyamalan’s operation – surreal, incredible, at times misleading – finds justification in the intention of its Creator , who inextricably associates the frenzy of the medium with the tumultuous vortex of events involving the characters. A frenzied crasis that while on the one hand risks compromising the suspension of reality, on the other hand it does not allow time for reflection until the revelation in the final act, the so dear to the twist ending director .

For spouses Guy ( Gael García Bernal ) and Prisca ( Vicky Krieps ) the time has come to make a decision: to separate or stay together for the sake of their children Trent and Maddox. In order to build a last happy memory for the children, involved in ever more constant quarrels, Prisca organizes a trip to the Anamika resort , a heavenly stay organized in the smallest details by the ambiguous director who tries in every way to hinder the friendship. between his nephew Idlib and Trent. Selected among the different guests, the family is taken to a desert island with golden sand, surrounded everywhere by majestic cliffs, together with the surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell ), his wife Chrystal ( Abbey Lee ), daughter Kara (played in adolescence by Eliza Scanlen ) and mother Agnes, psychologist Patricia ( Nikki Amuka-Bird ) with her nurse husband Jarin ( Ken Leung ) and rapper Mid-Sized Sedan ( Aaron Pierre ), apparently involved in the murder of a young woman.

What seems to be a heavenly place is actually complicit in a natural temporal anomaly: every half hour spent on the island corresponds to a year of life . The phase of adolescent puberty occurs in the turn of a change of plan: children first become adolescents and then adults, the elderly die, wounds heal, diseases are cured and cells regenerate. Each escape attempt collides with the natural resistances of an island – malignant mother – which engulfs her children by forcing them to deal with the unspoken, remorse, the necessary rarity of a time allowed to make peace with their own demons. The legacy of the journey, the saving bet, is a code to re-emerge from oblivion , aelitist language that the director translates cinematically for the screen as a metaphor for a choice that sees him as the protagonist:  decoding the message will set us free , it will give us back the coherent time of reality to decide whether or not to accept the compromise of incredibility .

The Last Words

film that thrives on the tension and suspense of the Shyamalan of the best of times, a thriller that conceals a profound reflection on our relationship with time. The director sometimes exaggerates by adding dramatic moments to the story, other times in explanations. But Old remains a great show.