One Liner Review:
A pretty good M Night Shamalan film, this one definitely loses steam in the mid-section, but pulls it together again for a cool twist ending.
Brief Review:
Call it Cabin in the Woods meets Lost, this movie about a mysterious beach with strange properties that cause abnormal things to happen to its inhabitants is pretty thrilling. It’s a movie about a bunch of strangers who meet up in this remote location, learn what they all have in common, and then have to deal with an unusual threatening situation. The movie is a combo of sci-fi and horror, and the way that it weaves in scientific logic and explanations from time to time, turns out to be very helpful in establishing credibility. The movie also features lots of death and horrific moments. It takes chances, and while the second act is not nearly as strong as the first or third, it’s still a pretty solid and compelling film.
REVIEW:
Old is a new M Night Shamalan film, and it is the best movie he has made in a long, long time. Now, it isn’t quite as good his original three movies, but it certainly comes close. Those three movies that put this writer / director on the map were The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs. Old doesn’t measure up to those movies, but it is also the next best thing he has done since then. That’s because after making those three movies, M Night followed them up with a series of stinkers from The Village to the Lady In The Water to The Happening. Then it got even worse. The Last Airbender and After Earth were M Night trying a new genre (Fantasy / Sci Fi,) and apparently those movies were just terrible. At that point, Night kind of fell off the map. Five misses in a row is hard to recover from. And yet he did. Night did this by building himself back up small, with movies like The Visit that featured a no name cast and a tiny budget. Then he made Split and then Glass. None of these movies were great, but they were all fine, and far better than anything Night had done during his period of bad movies. Now, with Old, Night is showing signs of what he once was and perhaps could one day be again.
The movie is about a creepy, sci-fi related situation that has plenty of elements of horror mixed with thriller. This is the kind of thing that Jordan Peele is making today. Of course, Peele’s movies are ten times smarter and deeper than anything by Shamalan, but this one comes pretty close. It also has elements of the Twilight Zone meets Tales From the Crypt (as do all of Peele’s films.) The premise here is that there is a private beach, secluded from the world, where people age at rapid paces. Once on the beach, every thirty minutes is equivalent to a year in the person’s life. So two hours is four years, and ten hours is twenty years. On top of that, there is no leaving the beach. Every time somebody tries, they are turned around, sent back to the beach, black out, and find themselves waking up right on the beach again.
That element, about not being able to leave the beach is something out of the great Luis Bunuel movie The Exterminating Angel, where a group of people find themselves as the guests at a mansion party, and then inexplicably find that they are unable to leave. It is also the premise of plenty of thrillers / horror movies, where a character is trapped inside somewhere, with no escape. Movies that range from Clue (trapped in a mansion, like the Exterminting Angel, to Devil (trapped in a elevator,) to Cube (trapped in a series of boxes.) The difference between Old and all of those other films is that in Old, the location is outdoors. Now that makes it a little more unbelievable. It’s not that there is a physical barrier preventing them from leaving, but simply that they black out. All of that is pretty cool. It’s the waking up on the beach in the same spot part that’s a little hard to roll with.
The movie is especially strong in its first act and last act. The first act establishes the characters and the hotel. Our leads here are a family of four, down to earth people, enjoying their last vacation together before the parents get divorced. Of course, they haven’t told their kids yet either, which always makes for an interesting dynamic. When a couple is getting divorced, they don’t usually go on vacation together. But these two don’t hate each other or have venomous feelings toward each other the way. that most divorced or about to be divorced couples do. In fact, the reasons for the divorce aren’t exactly clear, other than that one of them has found someone else.
The couple is made up of Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal,) and Prisca. They both have strong accents and are clearly not American. They have two children, Trent and Thomasin, who are 6 and 11 years old. We start out with this couple in a shuttle van, where they are all passengers as it takes them from the airport to the resort. The first sign of great camerawork comes when the van pulls up to the hotel, and we see all the employees standing around it waiting to greet the guests who get out. But we see this through the windows of the van, as the van is moving, and the camera moves around to show us this, creating a real point of view feel. M Night does more of this cool camerawork throughout the film. Another moment, not too long from now, has the characters arrive in their hotel room, and the camera stays outside the room, looking in through the windows. It tracks past the different windows as we see the kids jumping around on beds and hear Guy telling them about the percentage of accidents that happen in hotel rooms. He calculates people’s risks of living for insurance companies.
The parents have an argument in the hotel room, when they think they are alone, and don’t realize their kids are sitting in the next room, hearing everything. It’s about the divorce they are planning, and really establishes that situation for the audience. And then it’s the next morning at breakfast, and this is where we get to meet each of the other families or couples who will be important to the story. To make the connection to the popular HBO Show White Lotus is. no brainer. The first season of that show was out when this movie came out, and both are about hotel resorts where mysterious things happen to the guests. But in this movie, only the first act takes place at the hotel. The scene in the dining area where we meet the different families at their tables feels like something out of White Lotus, but considering both that show and this scene are great, that is definitely a good thing.
We meet Charles and Chrystal, a doctor (played by the great Rufus Sewell,) and his young, trophy wife. They are there with their daughter, Maddox, and his mother. We meet Patricia and Jarin, (Ken Leung,) who have a situation where she has epilepsy, and he is a nurse. She has a seizure right there, in the dining hall, and her husband attends to it and quickly helps deal with it. Finally, we meet a young Asian boy who is the son of the hotel manager, and makes friends with Trent and Thomasin. He hands them a paper with a secret message he wrote out that needs to be decoded. And it’s at this breakfast that the hotel manager comes over to the tables and asks families if they want to spend the day at this private, secluded beach with amazing views. They all say yes. And just like that, we are in the shuttle van again, off to the beach.
It starts out as just Guy’s family and Oliver’s family, but soon Jarin and Patricia join them. And there’s a man who is already on the beach when they get there. He’s a rapper who goes by the name Mid-Sized Sedan, and he was there with his girlfriend. She swam out in the ocean and never came back. The family settles on the beach, starts getting relaxed and enjoying it, and that’s when the girl’s body appears. She is dead. And her body has aged. Next, Charles’ mother dies. And the thing that really brings to the forefront what is happening is that the kids are aging. Their parents leave them along for a bit, and when they check in on them again, their kids look a lot older. The first we notice about this really comes from Jarin, who asks them how old they are, and takes guesses. When they tell him, he thinks they are messing with him. Then their parents come up and see them. This is all handled really well. Both the first two deaths and now the aging of the kids.
Unfortunately the next act is not nearly as well done. Once it has been established that the characters are aging, there isn’t a whole lot else for them to do other than try to escape. And that doesn’t happen. With two dead bodies, no cell reception, and no escape from this island, the characters are now facing a big problem. There is a moment where they all try to go different directions to escape, and all end up blacking out and waking up at the exact same moment, and it’s comical how ridiculous it looks. But for the most part, M Night films things in a way that don’t get unintentional laughs (the way his movie The Happening did.) Instead, he shows us only half of character’s faces, or does not show us the image that characters are looking at, to make the moment even more scary. Night has learned from his past mistakes. He now realizes that not showing can be far scarier than showing, and seeing something that looks more ridiculous than scary. And example of this comes when Mid-Size Sedan pulls the blanket off a dead body and we don’t get to see what he sees. We just watch his reaction and then the reaction of others who come to see it as well. Eventually, when we do get a bit of a look, we just see the outline or silhouette of bones as opposed to a whole skeletal body. Less is more in these cases, and the less you show, the more is left up to the audience’s imagination.
There’s a cool twist at the end, which rivals some of Night’s better end twists, but it’s the mid section of the movie that loses the audience a bit. It just becomes one thing after another, all happening a little too quickly This includes the face slashing of Mid-Sized Sedan by the doctor, the tumor growing inside a character and then its removal, the moment where Maddox gets pregnant and has a baby, and the climb up the side of a mountain. One thing cool is that this movie definitely takes chances. There’s a lot of risky moves that happen surrounding the pregnancy, as well as what happens to the baby. Night financed this movie himself, and has gone on record saying if there was a studio behind it, that whole sequence would have been the first thing they told him to cut. He’s probably right. But this movie definitely takes risks, including its death toll. The ending goes on way too long, and should have ended with the reveal of what this all meant. Instead, it becomes about getting justice, which is taking it one step too far. But the twist is definitely handled well, with us not just learning why it’s happening, but seeing an example of how it works. This is a pretty good movie, and definitely one that shows Night’s skill. He’s got tons of camera tricks here, and eery music that often sounds like a haunted wind blowing through the air. There are things that could have been better, and some of the acting feels pretty awkward from time to time, but it’s a creative and compelling movie.