Review: Old

Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.

Director M. Night Shyamalan's latest gets "Old" very quickly. The director, long known for his "Twilight Zone" styled setups and last minute plot twists, attempts to go back to the well for an original idea - although the film is based on the book "Sandcastle" by Pierre-Oscar Levy and Frederick Peeters - rather than update a previous property (like he did more recently with "Glass"), but the results are middling.

This is a movie with an intriguing concept that never materializes into something interesting. The setup is this: A group of vacationers - including a doctor with seeming anger management issues (Rufus Sewell) and his trophy wife, daughter and mother; a couple consisting of a male nurse and psychiatrist; a rapper (Aaron Pierre) with a name that makes me question whether Shyamalan has ever actually listened to hip hop; and a family with a mother (Vicky Krieps) harboring a health-related secret and father (Gael Garcia Bernal) who is playful with his young son and daughter (portrayed later in the film by Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff) - arrive at a fancy resort and are told by its management to seek out a hidden beach to which the hotel will provide drop-off and pickup services.

Things quickly go awry once they get there - a young woman has seemingly drowned, and Sewell's doctor instantly blames the rapper - whose name is Mid-Sized Sedan - who had arrived at the beach earlier than the others. However, stranger things begin to happen - the doctor's elderly mother suddenly dies without warning, Bernal and Krieps' children at first complain that their swimming suits begin to feel tight, and moments later the two children look as if they've aged about five years.

As it turns out, all of the characters on the beach begin aging - one year there is equal to about a half-hour - although the film doesn't handle this particularly smoothly. While the children seem to rapidly grow older, which makes enough sense, the adults don't seem to age much, but then suddenly look like senior citizens and drop dead. Tensions begin flare on the beach - especially any scenario involving the doctor, who appears to be suffering from some sort of mental illness. In fact, all of the visitors to the beach and their families have at least one person who is ailing from something. On several occasions, the visitors attempt to leave the beach, but find that some kind of force prevents them from doing so.

While "Old" has some admirable qualities - the film's camera work especially, most notably a sequence in which the camera appears to swing back and forth like the pendulum of a grandfather clock - they are overshadowed by the picture's overall messy structure and somewhat half-baked concepts.

There's little in the way of suspense, and at times it feels as if the filmmakers are merely going through a checklist of everything that can happen to someone when they age. Pregnancy that quickly materializes and comes to fruition? Check. Blurry vision? Check. Health problems that exacerbate at a rapid rate? Check.

The picture is also littered with expository or otherwise silly dialogue - my favorite is when one character tells another, "You're always talking about the future - and it makes me feel not seen!" - although a line from one young character to another about being neighbors one day and having mortgages made me smile. 

Shyamalan has long been seeking a comeback - at least from the standpoint of critical acclaim. "Split" was a modest hit, but while stretches of that picture were effective, I became annoyed with the lead character's multiple personalities. Early in his career - due to the shocking plot twist of "The Sixth Sense," the eerie and well-developed "Unbreakable" and the extremely creepy and underrated "Signs" - Shyamalan was hailed as the heir apparent to Steven Spielberg by way of Alfred Hitchcock. 

But nearly two decades worth of misfires later - from "Lady in the Water" and "The Last Airbender" to the more recent, and very disappointing, "Glass" - his new works are greeted less with excitement for another twist, but rather resignation that it won't be as good as his early work. I too hope to see Shyamalan get his groove back one of these days, but "Old" isn't it.