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Everyone loves to talk about the big twist at the end of an M. Night Shyamalan movie: was it right for you? Did you see it coming? Did that turn the rest of the movie into nonsense? (In some Shyamalan movies, no twist is needed to do this.) Yet despite all the attention to Shyamalan’s big teasing finals, it’s the little twists in her movies – the ones that happen along the way. – who can determine whether the film in question is to spin a thread worth telling or just to spin its wheels.
In “Old”, is Shyamalan’s latest-smart-or-just-silly-or-is-both? slow burning creepshow, there is a time you pass or not. Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are vacationing at a chic resort on a tropical island with their two children, Maddox (Alexa Swinton), 11, and Trent (Nolan River), 6). There is a bit of drama that kids don’t know; their parents are about to separate and Prisca has had a health crisis. Nonetheless, the couple put on a good face and accepted the offer of the creamy Euro Resort manager (Gustav Hammarstsen) to take a day trip to a special beach hidden behind a spectacular rocky cliff across the sea. the island. (The Van Driver is played by Shyamalan, who is now 50. For what it’s worth, he looks remarkably young.)
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On the beach, they’re joined by a handful of other hotel guests, and that’s when weird things start to happen. The body of a naked swimmer appears dead in the water. Anyone standing in the adjacent canyon faints. Oh, and the two kids suddenly look a lot older – they’re 16 and 11 now.
What is going on? The beach has a mysterious quality that ages everyone who is there. Every half hour you get a year old. It is mostly in children, but after a while the small tumor that was detected in Prisca’s abdomen is mentioned. It was three centimeters; now it’s the size of a golf ball – and then, a few minutes later, the size of a grapefruit. (He grows as fast as she ages.) So what’s going on? Charles (Rufus Sewell), an eccentrically intense and talkative doctor, decides to operate there on the beach, without anesthesia. (It turns out that an incision heals instantly.) Boom! – the tumor came out, just like that. But since audiences are still absorbing the premise of the film – that almost everyone on the beach will be heading to the grave within 24 hours – the fact that this impromptu operation is sort of …come, because Shyamalan thought it would be a good idea, may stay in your moviegoer stomach. It’s a whimsical twist more than logical, but Shyamalan doesn’t seem to care. It catches your attention!
“Old,” like most of Shyamalan’s films, has an eye-catching hook as well as some sleek cinematic gambits. But instead of developing his premise in insidious and powerful ways, the writer-director keeps throwing a lot of things at you. This naked swimmer was the lover of a famous rapper named Mid-Size Sedan (Aaron Pierre), whom Charles the surgeon was quick to accuse of murder. The film makes us think it’s a racist idea, but doesn’t hesitate to exploit it for the suspense. And why is the rapper’s nose bleeding? Charles and his wife, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), have their own 11-year-old daughter, Kara (Mikaya Fisher). got pregnant. And where are Guy and Prisca in all of this? Strangely, they don’t look any older. There is reference to wrinkles, and after a while we catch a glimpse of a few of them, but basically these two – and the other adults – kind of remain who they were, which seems extremely strange in a film which also deals with such dramatic developments.
When you pinch a thriller, you can sound like one of those people Hitchcock called, with weary futility, “the plausibles” (as if plausibility was all that mattered to them). But “Old”, even once you accept where it’s going, lacks form and consistency. It has a compelling visual style, with the camera hinting at things just out of sight, but the characters continue to explain who they are in cliched psychotherapeutic sound clips; sometimes the movie threatens to turn into the “Twilight Zone” version of a 12-step reunion. The characters are trapped on this beach and Shyamalan creates a compelling claustrophobia, but in part, you wish most of them were in better company.
A corpse loses its bones in half an hour. Adults all age in barely noticeable increments. Every family, tellingly, has an illness – but some are physical, others mental. (Charles the Surgeon is a headache that keeps wondering, for some damn reason, what movie Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando played. It was “The Missouri Breaks,” for anyone who plays the movie “Jeopardy”. ) One character ends up with a mass of twisted limbs like something out of a demonic possession movie. Another climbs the vertical rock face to escape, then fatally falls asleep on the climb. A few of those issues are brought to light with the big twist, which for a moment makes villainous characters look weirdly benign, and then turns villainous again. More than ever, however, the turn of a Shyamalan movie makes one wonder: was it worth watching the whole movie for this? Or is this feeling getting old?
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