Old (2021)

(On Cable TV, May 2022) I have long held that M. Night Shyamalan is a much better director than he is a writer (although the nadir of his career features films where he fails at both), but his last few films, while an improvement on the poisoned two-slaps of After Earth and The Last Airbender, have revealed a far more scattered Shyamalan – and one that seemingly lost his touch for credible human moments. Old, like his previous “Renaissance” films, is filled with high concepts, striking scenes and visual ideas, but seems woefully incapable of maintaining a consistent tone, remaining remotely credible, or wrapping things up in a satisfying package. The story, simply put, sees a few tourists stranded on a beach where they age a year each thirty minutes. While the original French graphic novel on which the film is based offered no explanations for this, Shyamalan crams a science-fictional (ish) explanation in the third act, to unclear success. Over and over again, highly contrived and artificial scenes take the place of plot development, with some ideas very quickly developed. Logic and physics are merrily ignored despite a few half-hearted explanations that aren’t really sustained. Characters are puppets to vehicle ideas, while the direction has an uncanny artificiality to it. Furthermore, chunks of Old are deliberately upsetting, which doesn’t do anything to paper over the film’s more substantial filmmaking problems. The result is a thoroughly mixed bag – don’t be surprised to flip back and forth on whether you like the results, sometimes in the span of mere moments. It’s ambitious, though, and I’d rather see Shyamalan get half-successes than the complete flops that characterized an earlier phase of his career – after all, it’s nearly a miracle that he survived that episode to write and direct again.