Old

I suppose Shyamalan deemed the way that his characters grapple with the central issue true-to-life and thought-provoking. I found their reactions to the increasingly crazy events of Old to be hilariously off. At one point, a couple decides to have sex, then nonchalantly emerges pregnant. One character understandably loses his mind – but then is somehow allowed to possess a knife and repeatedly stab folks with it, which is less understandable. I’m not asking for realism in what is essentially an extended Twilight Zone episode, but the slap-dash approach to actual human interactions is so miscalculated it blemishes everything else.

The shock tactics peppered throughout are risible at best. The most memorable moment, involving a bunch of broken limbs in a tight tunnel, again induces laughter instead of the intended dread. The actors do what they can, but even the talent assembled here can’t help getting swallowed up in the Shyamalan vortex of nonsense. Krieps perhaps suffers the worst, her thick accent and enunciation accentuating the ridiculousness of the dialogue.

“…essentially an extended Twilight Zone episode…”

While most of Shyamalan’s ideas for films seem to have struck up him in the middle of the night, that is not the case here. The filmmaker has adapted Old from the graphic novel Sandcastle, written by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters. The source material seems to have all the themes that he loves to toy with, so it makes sense he’d gravitate to the property. Yet no amount of slick camera angles or foreboding Trevor Gureckis music can cover the fact that all that’s remained is a grandiose idea with no coherent plot to support it. Some have complained that the film slides off the rails when its Big Twist is revealed, but honestly, by this point, a giant seagull could have swallowed all of the remaining characters, and it wouldn’t have mattered. How can a trainwreck slide off the rails?

The twist does bring me back to Shyamalan’s arrogance. It’s what prevents (most of) his films from becoming “so bad they’re good.” He assumes that the audience will walk out of the theater pondering the big questions: what is a life worth? How many lives are worth sacrificing? What moments matter most, and how do we savor them? I have the answer to that last one: avoid the dull, headache-inducing Old and savor watching The Sixth Sense again.