Film Review — Old
★☆☆☆☆ Shyamalan’s latest shoddy horror-thriller isn’t worth the time
Trapped on a secluded beach, a dream holiday becomes an existential nightmare when a group of strangers begin to age rapidly.
Self-described by its once-promising creator as his “latest trip”, Old is a fascinating concept drowned by sub-par filmmaking, room-temperature IQ dialogue, terrible acting and head-scratching logical inconsistencies.
Indeed if this is a trip, it’s more akin to being trapped in a smelly campervan in the arse-end of nowhere with a bunch of people you hate and no booze to quell the endless misery. And you’re there for a week.
Adapting existing material — the Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle, written by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters — Shyamalan washes away any of its original intrigue. His dialogue is once again particularly awful, with top-tier actors Vicky Krieps and Thomasin McKenzie stranded in a sea of nuanced-stripped drivel, written to hammer home things we can clearly discern for ourselves.
His directorial eye might be even worse. When he’s not spinning the camera around and spamming out-of-focus shots of the sky in the same way a floundering first-year film student would, Shyamalan fails to frame his shots correctly. Quite what he and cinematographer Michael Gioulakis were attempting is beyond me, but there are multiple crucial moments where characters are reacting to the horror unfolding, and all you can see are their noses bobbing right to left out of shot.
This can’t possibly be intentional, surely?
There are brief flashes of promise. The body horror aspects are fun, and the family at the heart of the story enjoy some moments that, for a second, threatened to make me feel something. But it was all too fleeting. Old is another dud in Shyamalan’s now mostly stinky filmography, another squandered premise smashed on the rocks by a diminished auteur whose last great film now feels like a lifetime ago.
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