Brilliant ideas, shame it’s so very silly
Shyamalan wants us to live in the moment. Too many moments in this film are moronic
Old Cert 15, 108 mins
★★✩✩✩
THE latest thriller from director M. Night Shyamalan is stuffed with brilliant ideas. It’s also one of the most ridiculous films of 2021. Set on an exotic beach that accelerates the ageing process, it involves a tsunami of bad lines.
Two families at an exclusive resort are offered the chance to sample a remote stretch of coast. Guy and Prisca (Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps) are accompanied by their kids, Maddox and Trent. Tetchy, racist Charles and his trophy wife Chrystal (Rufus Sewell and Abbey Lee) are with their six year-old Kara and Charles’s mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant; wasted).
Next to arrive are Patricia and Jarin (Nikki Amuka-Bird and Ken Leung). But then the body of a naked girl washes up. Prisca’s pre-cancerous growth becomes an urgent problem and Chrystal’s looks start to fade (“Don’t look at me!”).
What’s extraordinary is how the daft dialogue infects the talented cast. Bernal, Krieps, Sewell — for whole chunks of the movie, they frown and wave their arms around like am-dram rubes. Every now and again, though, they get a chance to shine. And you realise that this could have been a masterpiece.
The performances by the little kids are eerily sweet, and the older actors who take over the parts are also superb, with Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen especially memorable as insecure teens Kara and Trent.
Kara complains that they’ve missed out on the chance to do so many normal things. Think of the pandemic-scarred teenagers who’ll identify with that.
Shyamalan’s exploration of Charles’s early-onset dementia is also wily. In his The Visit (2015), the scary grand-parents, with their nappies and homicidal rages, turned out to be “mad” strangers. Here, horrific confusion is integral to family life.
But the fact remains that Old is never scary, and tension is consistently frit
tered away. The source graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters ended quietly. Shyamalan has come up with his own twist. It’s not awful. But nor is it satisfying or original.
Shyamalan wants us to live in the moment. Too many moments in this movie are moronic. Crazy but true though, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.
⬤ In cinemas