“Old”: M. Night Shyamalan plays on our fears of rapidly growing old, but there is a “purpose”
Near Angelic Mosaic Theater in Fairfax VA
In movies by M. Night Shyamalan, things just suddenly go wrong for the protagonists (like “we lost contact”). So it is with “Old”, where the media has presented a scenario where people have the aging of an entire lifetime compressed into a three day vacation “on the beach”.
There’s more to this, however. A motley group of people arrive at a tropical resort (the film was shot itn the Dominican Republic, and that may be controversial now). Although it seems like an ordinary resort at first, soon the guests are trekked a secluded beach to enjoy themselves for three days. I could laugh and say they didn’t invite Max Reisinger to make videos about the event (check his YouTube channel, it’s really interesting).
Stuff starts to happen, insidiously at first, as the conversations among the group seem dizzying and random. The central couple is Guy and Prisca (Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps) with two young children. Well, that’s one issue. Within a day they grow into puberty and young adulthood, and the girl gets pregnant. There is a dubious surgeon (Rufus Sewell), and a psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) whose epilepsy disappears.
One of the kids (while still {“young”) encounters a ghoul in the water who turns out to be a corpse. Later another character gets a basketball-sized tumor (melanoma, a bad scene indeed, can do that), which Sewell removes with an ordinary knife, and the wound heals instantly. People start to die, as the group, noticing the aging, tries to figure out how to get out of the cove. They could swim in the heavy waves, or they could try to climb the cliffs with suspicious magnetic rocks.
One idea the film did not experiment with is the idea of trying to cause a “time compression” syndrome with microwaves (something like Havana Syndrome on steroids). That was what I had been expecting.
The film does not make as much of the visual aging of the adults as it could, like with men going bald in the legs, for example. Well, the ads from Universal show crepe skin compared to young skin. And wrinkles appear and waistlines expand a bit.
I hate to play “spoiler”, but the “ending” is pretty political, especially now. Practically all of Shyamalan’s films have an ending where some nefarious entity is running the setup little mini world people are trapped in. (Remember “The Village” from 2004.) There is a pharma company running the show, and it wants to speed up the aging process to test various medications over lifetimes (especially vaccines – and guess how that fits into today’s “debate” of mRNA and Covid – which Bret Weinstein has been bringing up and getting censored on YouTube from talking about – but in principle these sound like legitimate long-term questions). And of course the corporate bad guys need to get caught. No one has a right to play “god” and sacrifice the few “vacationers” or partygoers for the billions of future generations (even with an issue like climate change.) I suspect Shyamalan had his own opinions about this and had an opportunity to make a statement with the film. Did he conceive of the story before the pandemic hit in early 2020? There were a lot of scripts and novels about pandemics written in late 2019; it seems that a lot of people somehow suspected something big was coming.
One disclosure in making this statement, I (at age 78) am fully vaccinated, and personally I encourage everyone to do the same. It works. It keeps you from getting very sick.
There is, in my major screenplay draft (“Second Epiphany”) and novel manuscript (“Angel’s Brother”) the concept of “de-aging” certain protagonistic characters, although I won’t get into details here.
Name: “Old”
Director, writer: M. Night Shyamalan
Released: 2021
Format: 2.35:1
When and how viewed: Angelika Mosaic, Fairfax Va, 2021/7/30, daytime, weekday, light audience
Length: 108
Rating: PG-13
Companies: Blinding Edge Pictures, Perfect World Pictures, Universal
Link: official
Stars: ***__
(Posted: Friday, July 30, 2021 at 7 PM EDT)
Posted on July 30, 2021
Categories B-Movies, horror, sci-fi