Relax, we have time – review of the movie “Old”

I am tempted to hypothesize that M. Night Shyamalan’s greatest defeat was his early triumph. The Sixth Sense from 1999 – a huge artistic and box office success – set the bar so high that over 20 years later the author is still trying to reach it. Will Old let him do that?

A vacation in paradise

And it starts inconspicuously. The Guy (Gael García Bernal) family is going on a long-awaited vacation. The marriage is in crisis, so there are high expectations for a few days’ rest in a tropical resort, which Prisca (Vickie Krieps) found in an internet search engine. Time is running out as the woman suffers from a potentially incurable cancer. The paradise complex does not arouse any suspicions, so when the hotel concierge offers a married couple a special offer – a trip to an intimate, private beach – the couple accepts it without thinking. On the spot, however, it turns out that this charming corner is not entirely ordinary – time flows differently in it, and the holidaymakers who are there begin to age at an unnaturally fast pace. Calculations show that the person staying on the beach has no more than several dozen hours of life left.

Lost paradise

The latest production of M. Night Shyamalan contains all the elements characteristic of the work of the original director, hence its fans have a chance to feel a certain kind of psychological comfort associated with communing with a familiar pattern. Thus, a group of confused people appears who are confronted with unusual circumstances and together make an attempt to unravel the mystery. Old starting pointit seems intriguing enough, even if it alludes to the popular topos of paradise, which ultimately turns out to be hell – a theme that has been present in culture for a long time and is eagerly used by authors. The next layer of mystery, in turn, refers to the timeless, deeply rooted fear of the inevitable – the passage of time and the natural degradation of the organism, a universal fear, strengthened both by traditional media messages and social media. The helplessness and the complete lack of agency in the face of force majeure are perfectly visible: the heroes, although qualified and selected according to the key of plot utility (Guy is an insurance analyst who calculates the risk, and Prisca is a museum expert; we also have a doctor, nurse, psychologist …), they are not able to stop the galloping the passage of time.

And up to a point, the formula works – sparingly dosed information and disturbing circumstances are interesting, and the riddle is engaging, even if the bizarre dialogues spoken by the characters do not sound particularly natural (which happens very often in Shyamalan’s scripts), and the tension is relieved from time to time, probably not quite end intentional ridicule. What works in the film and affects the audience as well is the consistently deepened feeling of disorientation. The concept itself, taken from the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, is also fantastic , but the longer we stay with Old, the harder it is to resist the impression that the director simply ran out of ideas for its creative use. Shyamalan loses the rhythm, pace and tone of the story: it can be scary, it can be funny, sloppy and bloody, but it is difficult to see these jumps in logic. It does not use the potential of a talented, international cast – at times you can get the impression that they appear on the screen only to recite the exhibition, and sometimes something happens to them. Ultimately, whether due to the imperfections of the script or the actors’ cold, mechanical play, the adventures of a group of holidaymakers bring to mind a rather virtual simulation – not even incredible, but simply devoid of a coherent vision and sense. There is no method to this madness.

Back to shore, Mr. Director

The film by M. Night Shyamalan must not miss perhaps the most characteristic element for him, that is, a surprising plot twist, redefining what we have been able to see so far. This one (for obvious reasons I will not reveal what it is) in the case of the director’s latest production strips the story of the remains of mystery and leaves nothing to the imagination. Previously sown seeds seem to germinate, as if certain signs could be read earlier, but it is worth asking yourself whether it was really necessary. In the humble opinion of the writer: no.

The Old production process was marked by a number of logistical difficulties and inconveniences. Suffice it to say that the shooting period fell, of course, in the middle of a global pandemic. The paradise beach, although undoubtedly beautiful, from the perspective of the team must have appeared rather like a plan from hell – washed by the waves, during the tides it simply … disappeared. Therefore, it is easy to imagine the haste and panic in which subsequent scenes were created. The actors, in turn, revealed in interviews that they had only … three hours to prepare and read the script. And all this can be seen in the final version of the film – if you wanted to describe Old in one word, it would probably just be “underdeveloped”. And yet Shyamalan, unlike his heroes, had time …

We invite you to the Old movie in the Cinema City cinema network!