IMDb plot summary: A vacationing family discovers that the secluded beach where they're relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day.
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Starring Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps, and Rufus Sewell.
Old is M. Night Shyamalan’s newest movie, about a group of resort tourists who go on a day trip to a beach that, they soon learn, ages them startlingly quickly. As children become teenagers, medical problems progress rapidly, and the older among the group begin dying, they have to figure out a way to get off the beach and back home. This reminds me very much of The Happening, in the sense that there is a genuinely terrifying premise at the core here, but the script reads like it’s been written by an alien who’s never seen humans interact before. It’s such a shame, because there are some extremely creepy moments of existential crisis that could be bone-chilling in the right writer’s hands. Instead, we get repetitive dialogue, bizarre revelations that come out of nowhere, deeply unrelatable responses to the crisis at hand. A lot of the film looks fantastic, and the concepts they play with are wonderfully eerie, but it all falls apart during the dialogue. I watched a video essay recently that posited that Shyamalan films almost all fare better when watched in black-and-white with no sound, and this is another to add to that list.
How it entered my Flickchart:
Old < The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle
Old > Gladiator
Old > V/H/S
Old > The 'Burbs
Old < Air Force One
Old > Dumbo
Old < Swing Time
Old < Wallace & Gromit in A Close Shave
Old > Top Gun
Old < Pulp Fiction
Old < Out of Time
Old < L.A. Confidential
Final spot: #1879 out of 3450, or 46%.
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