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M. night shyamalan’s ‘old’: film review.

Starring Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, the filmmaker's latest contrasts a lush tropical destination with a baffling disease of the flesh.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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Landing somewhere between The Happening and The Village on the Shyamalanometer of Narrative Gimmickry, M. Night Shyamalan ’s Old places a dozen or so travelers together on a remote beach, then watches them live the rest of their lives in a day. Facing a strange phenomenon that greatly accelerates the aging process, strangers must collaborate in search of escape even as time worsens their deficiencies and the director strains (with ostentatious camera movement and some stunning scenery) to keep things from feeling like a Twilight Zone morality play.

Viewers who can take it at face value may find a chill or two here, but ultimately Old can’t escape the goofiness of its premise long enough to put its more poetic possibilities across successfully.

Full credits

Production company: Blinding Edge Pictures Distributor: Universal Pictures Cast: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Kathleen Chalfant, Alexa Swinton, Nolan River, Kylie Begley, Embeth Davidtz, Eliza Scanlen, Alex Wolff, Emun Elliott, Thomasin McKenzie Director-Screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan Producers: M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan, Marc Bienstock Executive Producer: Steven Schneider Director of photography: Mike Gioulakis Production designer: Naaman Marshall Costume designer: Caroline Duncan Editor: Brett M. Reed Composer: Trevor Gureckis Casting director: Douglas Aibel

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Old, review: A provocative horror that brings out the best and worst in M Night Shyamalan

‘sixth sense’ maestro seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot holes than creating wonder, article bookmarked.

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Dir: M Night Shyamalan. Starring: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee. 15, 108 mins.

M Night Shyamalan still can’t quite shake his reputation as the king of plot twists. It doesn’t matter what he’s done in the decades since Haley Joel Osment saw dead people. The label has stuck. And it’s not quite a fair one. Shyamalan shouldn’t be defined by his twists, but by his constant unpredictability. It’s a subtle but important difference. What makes his horror films so effective – when they’re at their best, at least – is that he allows his stories to exist in a sense of perpetual tension. At any moment, the path might change. They could slip wildly into a different genre. New nightmares could emerge from any corner. What determines whether a Shyamalan film is good or bad is how he deals with that build-up of terror. Does he let it linger menacingly in the air? Or try to soothe it out of his audience’s minds with a tidy ending? Old , in that sense, brings out both the best and worst in him.

In its opening scene, we’re introduced to what should be a blissful scenario: a wealthy, nuclear family on a tropical vacation. The parents, Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), gaze adoringly as their young children zoom around their hotel room. But the camera sits waiting on the outside, watching them through the windows, pacing up and down like a jaguar readying for the kill. What hidden torment will soon be revealed to us? Old feels like a repeat of Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village – it’s provocative and inventive right until the point the director retreats into narrative neatness and conventional emotions.

A manager suggests the family spend the day at a private beach – one of those little-known hotspots that all holidaymakers crave. They’re soon joined by a second family – a doctor ( Rufus Sewell ), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and his modelesque wife (Abbey Lee), plus his young child. A little later, another couple, played by Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird, arrive. A dead body, floating facedown in the water, is the real starting point for Old ’s reign of terror. There’s a man, too, crouched in the shadows, who nervously reveals himself to be a popular rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) – it’s unclear whether the name is intended as a joke or just a sign of cultural disconnect.

But there’s a strangeness that starts to consume these people the very second they step foot on the beach. They can’t quite put their finger on it. But their bodies simply don’t quite feel like their bodies any more. The truth is that their cells have started to age rapidly – the reason why is part of the great mystery Shyamalan knows his audience will be eager to solve. Although the film is actually an adaptation of the Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle , by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, the director has provided his own resolution to the story.

Gael Garcia Bernal: ‘I dare Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu to work with me again’

All the implicit themes at play here – not only of our general fears of ageing, but of the doomed inevitability that our medical histories create – run strongly throughout Old . There’s a primal potency to them. But the film, just like The Village , suffers from Shyamalan’s desire to forever chase a sense of order within the universe. Sometimes this can actually be quite refreshing – Old is the rare horror where the characters are all hypercompetent – but Shyamalan’s persistent refusal to leave behind any wonder, or instability, ultimately strips Old of its staying power. He seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot hole that might send Reddit users into a rage than he does in creating something emotionally satisfying. It’s hard to talk about his films as something more than their endings when it’s the endings that always seem to decide their fate.

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“Old,” Reviewed: M. Night Shyamalan’s New Old-School Sci-Fi Movie

Just as it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken , it takes a smart filmmaker to make a stupid movie, which I mean in the best possible way. Science-fiction films, once a cinematic counterpart to pulp fiction, are today often big-budget, overproduced spectacles that substitute grandiosity for imagination. M. Night Shyamalan ’s new film, “Old” (which opens in theatres on Friday), is different. His frequent artistic pitfall is complication—the burdening of stories with extravagant yet undeveloped byways in order to endow them with ostensible significance and to stoke exaggerated effects. With “Old,” facing the constraints of filming during the pandemic —on a project that he’d nonetheless planned before it—Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity.

The movie, based on the graphic novel “ Sandcastle ,” by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, is centered on a tropical beach resort in an unnamed country. (Filming was done in the Dominican Republic.) There, the Capa family—a near-middle-aged couple, Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and Guy (Gael García Bernal), their eleven-year-old daughter, Maddox (Alexa Swinton), and their six-year-old son, Trent (Nolan River)—arrives for a vacation in a state of emotional stress and stifled conflict that’s already on view in a van ride on a road lined with palm trees. At the gleaming hotel, the family is met by an obsequious manager (Gustaf Hammarsten), who, backed by a line of smiling staffers, plies the parents with cocktails from a prompt server named Madrid (Francesca Eastwood). The attention is too great, the welcome suspiciously wrong—it’s obvious to viewers, if not to the Capas, that something is amiss.

Trent, a quirkily earnest and precocious kid who’s in the habit of asking adults their names and “occupations,” quickly befriends another boy in the lobby. His name is Idlib (Kailen Jude), and he’s the manager’s lonely nephew, whose furtive solitude is also an evident warning sign. Prisca and Guy seem obliviously delighted with the luxury, but they’re also distracted by their troubles: the vacation is something of a last hurrah, because they’re on the verge of splitting up. (There’s also something up with Prisca’s health that they haven’t told the children.) The emotional shadows are dispelled when the manager offers the family a day trip to a secluded, secret beach—a place that he claims few guests get to see. Yet they’re joined by another family in the van that takes them there—a high-powered cardiothoracic surgeon named Charles (Rufus Sewell), his wife, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), her mother (Kathleen Chalfant), and their young daughter, Kara (Kylie Begley). (The van’s driver is played by Shyamalan himself.)

There’s a long and eerie walk from the drop-off spot through a grotto to the beach, which is indeed splendid. But then other people turn up, including a psychologist named Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), who has severe epilepsy; her partner, Jarin (Ken Leung), who is a nurse; and also a well-known rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). Then a corpse turns up, and then rusted-out cutlery that evokes the visits of other, earlier guests. Later, a few other odd events introduce the movie’s key idea: suddenly, the children start growing up very quickly. In a few hours, Trent looks like a big kid of eleven and Maddox looks like a high-school student. Then the adults start aging rapidly, too, and the panic that sets in is amplified when Charles gets hold of a knife, in a “ Lord of the Flies ”-like power trip, and when the group starts to experience strange, accelerated medical symptoms.

Shyamalan takes conspicuous pleasure in cannily graphic visual compositions, emphasizing significant details without isolating them from the film’s keenly observed settings, which evoke troubled states of mind in a jolting glance. (His own enthusiastic attentions in imagining and crafting the movie’s elements are infectious, and the movie is as much fun to recall as it is to watch.) The timing of reveals, the use of the soundtrack to cue offscreen events, and the deployment of basic effects to conjure inner experience express his delight in primal cinematic power. Shyamalan’s simplest and best coup de cinéma is his depiction of children aging years in the span of mere hours. What he does is change the casting, from one shot to the next—older versions of the kids are played by different actors (Thomasin McKenzie as the older Maddox, Mikaya Fisher and Eliza Scanlen as older versions of Kara, and Luca Faustino Rodriguez and Alex Wolff as growing Trents). The adults age, too, and the visual effects to show it are matched by the emotional effects of encroaching mortality. There’s some just-short-of-gore medical fantasy that veers from the simple wonder of cutaneous special effects to the macabrely skeletal to the over-the-top surgical. There’s the calamity of mental illness and an ugly element of racism that goes with it. There’s the grim realization that the beach’s supernatural powers are no accident but part of a scheme, and, as the aging process and its related agonies begin to take their toll, there are practical efforts to organize defense and resistance when the sense of a large-scale dirty trick takes hold among the survivors.

The working out of the plot and the inevitable then-there-were-none-like attrition of the group brought to and trapped on the private beach lead to some coy narrative trickery, and also to some ultimate twists that are both logical and ridiculous. “Old” takes place in a dramatic bubble that, if it’s poked a touch too hard, will quickly pop, but while it’s afloat it’s both iridescent and melancholy. The modes of loss that Shyamalan dramatizes range from the confusion of sudden adolescence and the anguish of onrushing decrepitude and death to the merely uncanny sense that unexpected pleasures are too good to be true. The economy of the premise leads Shyamalan (whose own role in the film proves exuberantly droll) to unleash images of a simple but extreme expressivity, culminating in one that I’ll be thinking about for a while—a tracking shot, on the beach, that sticks with the action at times and departs from it at others, and that, in its evocation of time in motion, reminds me of the inspirations of a modernist master of visualized time, Alain Resnais . Shyamalan reaches such a peak only once in the film, but it’s a brief high that few filmmakers ever even approach.

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M. Night Shyamalan returns with Old, a floppy but haunting thriller about aging

It’s at its best when it’s at its weirdest.

by Alissa Wilkinson

A close-up of Gael García Bernal’s face. He looks confused.

Few things are more delightful than a movie with one big, silly concept that it runs right into the ground. Plot? Who needs it! Character development? Unnecessary. The ship is sinking and everyone needs to get off; huge man-eating ants or giant earth-shaking worms threaten humankind; the zombies are headed this way. Movies like this conjure a world in which everything is a little senseless and absurd. No matter who you are, you might live a long and fulfilling life, or you might get stomped on by a dinosaur. The human condition, in two hours.

Old, the latest thriller from the endlessly inventive — if not always successful — director M. Night Shyamalan, spends a lot of its runtime being this sort of movie. It spoils nothing to say it’s a movie where sudden and uncontrollable aging is the problem (just look at the title), and the characters are preoccupied with figuring out how to escape it.

That said, if you wish to avoid actual spoilers, bow out now.

The reason for the aging is not entirely clear — it seems to be caused by the beach Old ’s characters are vacationing on, or maybe a cliff that surrounds it? In any case, as aging comes for us all, so it comes, at an accelerated pace, for those who’ve arrived at this little cove just looking for a refreshing day near the water. There’s Guy (Gael García Bernal) and his wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps), whose marriage is on the rocks, and their two young children: 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and his 11-year-old sister Maddox (Alexa Swinton). Jarin (Ken Leung), a nurse, is also there, as is his psychiatrist wife Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird). Another family completes the group: a doctor (Rufus Sewell), his beautiful wife (Abbey Lee), her mother (Kathleen Chalfant), and 6-year-old Kara (Kylie Begley).

Four figures on a beach. They look toward the water, and appear confused.

Everyone in the group is staying at a nearby resort, and they’ve been brought to the secluded beach by one of the resort employees. (Keeping with tradition , Shyamalan himself plays that role.) When they arrive on the beach, there’s only one other person there, sitting crouched and quiet near the giant cliff that looms above. Maddox, to her delight, recognizes him: He’s a rapper, and in perhaps the movie’s most delightful twist, his stage name is “Mid-Sized Sedan.” (He’s played by Aaron Pierre, who was devastating as Caesar in Amazon’s recent miniseries The Underground Railroad .)

They set up their coolers and chairs and sit a while, but then things start getting ... weird. Really weird. They find a body, to their horror. A small, benign tumor in Prisca’s abdomen starts growing. The doctor begins saying weird things. Wounds don’t act right. Leaving the beach seems impossible. The kids start springing into adolescence without warning. (They are played, at various ages, by Luca Faustino Rodriguez, Mikaya Fisher, Little Women ’s Eliza Scanlen, Hereditary ’s Alex Wolff, and Leave No Trace ’s Thomasin McKenzie.)

There’s a lot to like about Old , especially its slow, measured movement. The movie crafts a vast, sunny, sweaty landscape of dread. Shyamalan’s particular visual sense, which favors unexpected framings that produce interesting images, is on full display, even when it’s hampered by the fact that the characters are simply on a beach, with little to look at that isn’t in the background. For much of the movie, the characters have figured out what’s happening to them, even if they don’t know why, and the action is all in their attempts to escape either the island or the inevitable.

But it’s also the epitome of a “your mileage may vary” experience. Shyamalan has not grown any more skilled at writing dialogue over the years, and while stilted dialogue can work in some circumstances (in 2004’s The Village , it eventually made sense), it doesn’t pay off here. It’s not Old ’s constant exposition that’s the problem so much as the unending, clunky over-explanation. Do kids really need to be told what their parent means when they shout “Run! Hide!”?

That screenplay (or perhaps some bad direction) seems to tie the hands of Old ’s very fine cast behind their backs. In the film’s best moments, though, I found myself thinking of Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film The Exterminating Angel , in which a group of wealthy people find themselves trapped in a drawing room, mysteriously unable to escape as their psyches, relationships, and veneer of civilization slowly disintegrate. That film is baldly allegorical and obviously satirical, surreal in ways that are haunting even after it’s over. Its refusal to really explain what’s going on is unsettling.

Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps on the beach, with a yellow umbrella behind them.

In its last act and the coda that follows, Old becomes more sentimental, more of a family drama than the film seemed to be at the start — and then, all of a sudden, it turns into something like science fiction. The change-up is not exactly a twist, but in an M. Night Shyamalan film, it’s not unexpected. You know going in that there’s going to be more to the story, that you’ll eventually find out what’s going on with the ... oldness. That’s why the film’s trailer shows so much of its hand; it knows audiences will be intrigued by whatever is actually happening. This guy directed The Sixth Sense , after all. There’s got to be an explanation.

There is, indeed, an explanation — but I kind of wish there wasn’t. For most of Old , the sheer weirdness of the setup is what’s so compelling. The movie is loosely based on the graphic novel Sandcastle , by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, which has quite a different ending than the film and one that, for my money, is more satisfying.

While the logic Old provides makes sense, I can imagine a better movie that ends 20 minutes earlier and gives fewer answers, leaving us with more of the unnerving, wistful sadness that always comes along with stories about aging and mortality. I think of movies like She Dies Tomorrow , which don’t bother to offer explanations and thus, I’d argue, better mimic what they’re trying to evoke: the absurdity and tragedy of life.

In making a plot pivot and then meticulously explaining itself, Old is peak Shyamalan — a little sentimental, a little surprising, a little labored. When compared to his recent movies like Glass and Split , it’s still eerily spare, a mode that suits him well. And the moments when Old is cranking into high-concept gear are fun to watch and disquieting.

Being old is not, in itself, any worse or better than being young. Yet the feeling that time is slipping away, that the sand in the hourglass is falling fast, will induce existential angst in the best of us. When one of Old ’s characters laments, at one point, that it’s simply not fair that they’ve missed so many milestones in life because of this beach, they’re not wrong. Frankly, after the pandemic year we’ve just been through — and given the looming uncertainty of the future — who can’t relate?

So at its best points, Old taps into something primal. Isn’t life ultimately a high-concept horror movie, in which the concept is we’re all going to die?

Old is currently in theaters.

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M. Night Shyamalan Still Knows What You’re Thinking — And ‘Old’ Leans Into Its Twists

By K. Austin Collins

K. Austin Collins

M. Night Shyamalan knows you’re thinking: Wait for it . And, Everything is a clue . He knows that, ever since The Sixth Sense , with its late-stage, near-spontaneous clicking into place of suggestions and hints many viewers didn’t even know they were meant to be looking out for, audiences have watched his work with an eye verging on suspicion. And we’re all so busy looking for the catch that we sometimes overlook the more enduring, sometimes beautiful, often silly, not-infrequently satisfying pleasures he brandishes right in front of our faces — pleasures that include his continually impressive hand, alongside his estimable collaborators, as a stylist and technician. He knows that he’s contemporary American movie-going’s answer to O. Henry, a name synonymous with “twist,” if only because of our own, enduring expectations.

https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-features/m-night-shyamalan-glass-interview-771063/

Granted, Shyamalan has also persisted in leaning into the idea. Surely he knows that this has set up some of his work to fail among a clue-hungry audience, making us look for twists and last-minute dashes of clarity where what his work means to offer is something more metaphysical, as in Signs , or where the endgame can’t quite withstand the pressure of having to cleverly sweep the rug from beneath our feet, as in The Happening or The Village — two maligned movies which, whatever their faults, are parables hiding in plain sight, more notable for what they’re trying to say than for what they mean to withhold, even as in classic Shyamalan style, plenty gets withheld until the last minute.

On the surface, it’s a little reminiscent of the problem that Hitchcock’s Psycho still faces , with its long-beleaguered ending — its late drift into explanatory psychobabble feeling incommensurate, for some, with everything that came before. You simply cannot explain away the inexplicable, the horrific, the outright weird. The difference is that Psycho ’s power is in exactly its willingness to illustrate that gap by risking our dissatisfaction: The ending doesn’t really match up with the sublime avenues of horror leading up to it, which ultimately becomes a failure, not of the movie, but of the people within it, trying to make sense of nonsense in ways that feel unasked-for, almost intrusive.

Shyamalan’s films have a related but different problem: Everything leading up to their endings seems predicated on the promise of explanation. Sit around, wait awhile; it’ll all make sense-ish eventually. Or, if you choose, watch with magnifying glass in hand, trying to get a step ahead of the movie, as Sherlock might.

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One of the funny things about Old, Shyamalan’s new movie, is that, for all its mysteries and their conclusory (and not very satisfying) explanations, the real meat of the endeavor is devoted to the fairly obvious. A Thing is happening; watching people deal with that Thing is, more-so than any explanation for why it’s happening, what the movie is about. The eventual explanations are extraordinarily secondary; you could lop them off of the movie and arrive at a project whose prevailing “message” is perhaps muddled, but whose effects and main ideas aren’t, or at least, not really. In the first place, what the movie is about largely traffics in the obvious — starting with the tone set by its title, Old , and the poster, in which that word lingers menacingly over a woman’s foot that’s being rendered skeletal before our eyes, as if the beachy shores on which the woman appears were some sort of death-ray vision.

Maybe they are! That would be pretty corny. But corniness is next to godliness in the world of Shyamalan, and Old — with its overt dialogue, its obviousness at every turn, its overly-neat echoing in characters’ backstories and occupations — is better, not worse, for laying almost all of its cards on the table, practically in full view from the start. The movie stars Phantom Thread ’ s Vicky Krieps, as Prisca, a museum curator, and her husband, Guy, an actuary for an insurance company, is played by Gael García Bernal . A married couple that seem to be on the outs (or at least on the verge), they decide to take the kids on an exotic weekend getaway. Fast-forward — past the hushed arguments between Prisca and Guy; past the random oddities and light catastrophes happening at the resort; all the tidbits of maybe-relevant, maybe-not information that leak out with perverse frequency — to the hotel manager offering them a sweet deal: Access to a secret beach on a nature preserve, only a short ride away — an offer extended to only his favorite guests, of course.

So it begins. For this to be the only family given such an offer would be too good to be true; other families have also, apparently, been invited. A doctor ( Rufus Sewell ) and his modelesque younger wife (Abbey Lee), both of them vain, though in distinct ways, plus his mother and their daughter; a psychiatrist named Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her husband, Jarin (Ken Leung), who’s a nurse. Them, plus a beach straggler that they all only notice after the fact. Make that two stragglers. One, we learn, is a dead body.

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Life's a beach.

Old hits theaters on July 23.

M. Night Shyamalan's Old, which tackles the distinct horrors of aging, ends up being a fascinating entry to the director's spotty career. It may not be his greatest work, but it is one that uses an intriguing premise to tackle profound ideas — ones that probably won’t easily fade away, even when you’re old and gray.

Old follows mother and father Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (a gripping Vicky Krieps) and their two children — the six-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) — as they venture to a scenic island for a relaxing vacation. Like other Shyamalan films, Old pits nature against humans, and there’s a reason why that’s a tried and true method: it works. The picturesque seaside provides a stark contrast to both the family’s brewing drama and the grim supernatural happenings that start to unfold as people start aging rapidly. All the while, two families are trapped on the beach, surrounded by two natural barriers, effectively eliciting thrills and instilling a sense of dread and hopelessness.

What's the best M. Night Shyamalan movie?

A veteran cast makes much of Old an eye-gluing watch. Each actor must play not just their age, but the age they’ve just transitioned from and the one they're heading towards, sometimes all at once. Take Eliza Scanlen and Alex Wolff, for instance; they’re playing teens experiencing rampant hormones, yet they still think like six-year-olds. It’s a tricky balance to strike – and yet the cast walks that line with aplomb from top to bottom.

Old, adapted from Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters’ graphic novel Sandcastle, is at its best when it’s using the impending threat of death from what would normally be natural causes for scares. It takes real medical issues like dementia, cancer, blindness, and deafness and represents them through sharp sound mixing, capturing the anxieties felt when we notice the ways in which our bodies are breaking down over decades. These premature ailments lead to some gnarly instances of body horror, some of them subtle and some of them gruesomely bone-crunching.

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Sometimes, cinematographer Mike Gioluakis discovers creative ways to express those horrors in detail, such as a fractured close-up of the deep lines tracing a character’s face. Even in these close-ups, the aging special effects and makeup hold up, never devolving into a hammy artifice. At other points, though, the camerawork isn’t quite as effective: it will sometimes sway from central characters to a blank vantage point capturing the horizon, which really only serves to undercut a real loss happening on screen.

The other way that Old undermines itself is with its dialogue. Unlike the impenetrable beach entrapping the characters, this plot is far from incomprehensible. In fact, the overabundant and often stiff conversations readily hand over the answers to what should be the most confounding mysteries rather than asking us to connect the dots ourselves. It’s as though Shyamalan is so self-conscious of his reputation for twist endings that go over some people’s heads that he works overtime to diffuse the twists before they explode. The strategy can make Old a frustrating watch.

Still, there was never a moment where the slow-burn confrontation with mortality wasn’t completely enthralling. The message that we should remain young at heart and quickly move past petty squabbles and empty signifiers of status is a powerful pull. In that regard, Old might be Shyamalan’s most humanist film. It’s less concerned with the puzzles themselves and more with the people running within the mazes. By the end, we’re not meant to care about the mystery or the clues that don’t align. Instead, the overriding thought is to live as though there’s no tomorrow.

Old works best when it focuses on the horror of young people experiencing the ravages of age long before their time. Strong performances from the entire cast manage to cover up what is quite possibly the worst and least rhythmically believable dialogue of M. Night Shyamalan’s career, excluding his dismal live-action Avatar: The Last Airbender. And the shocks of catharsis that lifted his previous works like The Sixth Sense, Signs and Split are missing here due to ham-fisted explanations, including of things that would’ve been better left as mysteries. Nevertheless, Old is just as profound as any thriller Shyamalan has done. It’s a film that probably won’t merit repeated viewings, but that first one is a thought-provoking meditation on what it means to be alive that brings up dark, buried feelings like the water that kisses the sand.

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Old Review: M. Night Shaymalan’s Latest Is A Fun And Frightening Thrill Ride

Throughout his career, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan has dealt in the terror of the unknown in various shapes and forms. Usually telling claustrophobic stories of fear, the director has broadened his scope to its widest extent with Old , an adaptation of the graphic novel Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy. While the film does start off a little uneven, it flies fast and fierce once the plot kicks in, turning into a fun and frightening thrill ride.

Most of Old’s story follows the Capa family as their idyllic tropical vacation is not as tranquil as they hope. As Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and Guy ( Gael Garcia Bernal ) take their young boys children Maddox and Trent to a random resort Prisca found online, there’s already something hiding underneath the surface of their familial facade. So when an opportunity to travel to a private beach arises, the family jumps in excitedly, unaware that what follows is about to unravel as a nightmare of aging and paranoia.

Away from the familiar territory of Philadelphia, Old opens up M. Night Shyamalan’s visual scope to great effect.

Old is actually the first film that sees writer/director M. Night Shyamalan completely move away from his usual home base of Philadelphia. While the town still plays a role in the film’s narrative, the natural beauty of the Dominican Republic is where the movie actually gets to unfold, with said beautiful beach making up the central setting of the film’s action. Shyamalan uses the new, fresh territory to his advantage, and creates a wide open horror film with the story he’s adapting.

Beautiful and expansive as the beach is, through a combination of isolated locations, as well as camera movement and editing choices, there’s still a sense of claustrophobia in Old . Rather than limiting his tale to a closed off location, the simple isolation of the tropical beach is the truly confining feature, as a ticking clock helps enclose the group of travelers on the beach in a mystery that could end with their premature deaths.

Old truly thrills once it knows what it's doing, but it does take a little while to really shift into gear.

The weakest section of Old is the process of introducing audiences to the story's cast of characters. It’s absolutely essential to set up the Capa family dynamic, as they’re the centerpiece of the film’s cast. However, there’s some setups throughout the opening act of the film that feel less organic and more awkwardly built into the story that’s about to take off – such as young Trent running around with a friend asking people their names and occupations. But once Old does find its footing and begins putting its characters through a rapidly aging nightmare, M. Night Shyamalan’s story takes off at breakneck pace.

While it’s careful to try and lay out as many breadcrumbs as it can for the audience, Old’s pacing is fast enough to be exhilarating – but a little too fast to go anywhere deeper than it absolutely needs to. Strong performances from Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps, as well as Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie as the slightly older versions of their children, do go a long way towards smoothing the gaps in story. By the end of the wild ride a lot of things have happened, and it all adds up to a fun summer blockbuster with a wild finish. There’s also some pretty strong visual scares that push the boundary of the PG-13 rating, which should result in some elicited screams from theatrical audiences.

With another M. Night Shyamalan ending fans will be talking about, Old is absolute summer fun.

Without spoiling anything, Old is another M. Night Shyamalan movie that will have audiences talking about how it all wraps up. In the pantheon of Shyamalan twists, this film’s endgame actually ranks among the best of his big reveals. But what’s even more surprising is how the movie doesn’t spare the emotional toll of the ending while trying to land a huge jaw dropping finale. Though if you’ve read Sandcastle’s source material, it appears that M. Night Shyamalan’s interpretation is a more definitive answer than what was give in the text.

Old is solid summer fun, providing a lightning fast thriller for audiences that successfully mixes body horror with emotional family drama. A new experiment in wide open spaces featuring the same confined paranoia that M. Night Shyamalan has mastered, the film is both familiar and unique. From which well the film decides to draws at any time throughout is part of the excitement, as the quick nature of this latest mystery will keep everyone guessing in anticipation of the next scare.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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M. Night Shyamalan’s Old Is Beautifully Made and Terribly Written

M. Night Shyamalan can make a shot of palm trees sinister, just by the way he moves a camera. Old opens with fronds dancing in front of a bright sky, and then transitions to the vacationing family on the road below, as though the humans are already an afterthought, fodder for the high concept horror awaiting them. Shyamalan’s always been great on a granular level, crafting shots that place you in the mindset of the characters, or, in the case of this new film, decidedly outside of it. The Sixth Sense goes careening in sympathetic terror down the hallway after a retreating Haley Joel Osment, only to reverse and show us what he sees — the bathrobed ghost starting after him — before closing up his blanket fort. Signs holds on Joaquin Phoenix’s face, shifting with him as he tries to get a better look at what he doesn’t yet know is an alien on the roof, only for the creature to jump down off-screen, out of sight of the characters as well as that subjective lens, leaving rustling corn and a creaking swing in its wake.

In contrast, Old makes a repeating motif of the camera panning horizontally across the beach on which the characters are stuck, and treating their faces with the same indifference as the landscape. It’s so nicely done that it takes a while to admit to what a bummer the movie is, caught between brutal exercise and metaphor for the fleeting nature of time. It doesn’t care about its characters, but tries to pretend it does in the end, in what feels like a blatant failure of nerve. They’re barely characters, is the thing — more of a collection of professional titles, with Trent (Nolan River), the 6-year-old baby of the family, having a conveniently precocious habit of asking everyone he meets what their name and occupation are. Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a psychologist, while her husband, Jarin (Ken Leung), is a nurse. Aaron Pierre plays a rapper whose name is, spectacularly, Mid-Sized Sedan, and Rufus Sewell is Charles, a doctor. Charles’s spouse, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), isn’t given a chance to describe her career, though an accurate description would be something like “trophy wife.” Their daughter, Kara (Kyle Bailey), is with them, as is Charles’s mother, Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant).

Trent’s older sister, Maddow (Alexa Swinton), is 11 and not yet working age (the children are played by additional actors as they get older), but their parents, Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), talk about their jobs the way some people talk about their astrological signs. “You’re always thinking about the past! You work in a goddamn museum! ” Guy yells at Prisca early on, and later explains his perspective on the world to another character by noting that, as an actuary, he calculates risk. This picture-book-simple shorthand to introducing an ensemble would feel less clumsy if the intent were only to kill off the characters one by one, but Old is intent on trying to make its audience care about its primary foursome, and the way that Guy and Prisca have been teetering on the precipice of divorce. The beach vacation is meant to be a three-day reprieve, a way of avoiding thinking about the couple’s impending separation, and also the supposedly benign abdominal tumor Prisca recently discovered.

A day after arriving at the island resort (“Can you believe I found this online ?” Prisca gloats ominously), the manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) offers the family a chance to visit a secluded beach on the neighboring nature preserve, an opportunity he claims to only give to guests he likes. It should be clear that something’s awry from the moment the impossible-to-like Charles and his family enter the van, but the group proceeds to the beach under the guidance of their driver, played by Shyamalan himself. As the man responsible for ushering the victims onto the deadly beach, and later observing them from afar, the character is clearly a kind of directorial stand-in. But despite the self-acknowledged sadism of the set-up, in which the beach’s inhabitants slowly realize they are aging about two years an hour, there’s a timidity to the film that makes it exasperating. Old is adapted from Sandcastle , a graphic novel by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters that has a more ambiguous tilt, and the movie never squares its desire for body horror with its late impulse to have its characters try to reconcile their differences and reflect on what’s actually important.

There’s a death of imaginative gruesomeness, an instance of emergency surgery, and a disturbingly accelerated pregnancy, but there are also long, tedious freak-outs from characters lacking the dimension to merit them. Shyamalan, who’s been working his way back toward bigger budget productions ever since breaking himself out of movie jail with 2015’s The Visit , feels caught between the more emotionally considered movies he used to make, and the leaner, meaner ones he’s done more recently. His filmmaking can’t make up for the fact that Old is hovering indecisively between the two halves of his career, unable to commit to either direction.

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Compelling concept, so-so execution; disturbing scenes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Not many overtly positive messages, but it does ex

Guy and Prisca try to protect their kids and calm

High body count: Characters succumb to everything

Brief shot of a woman's bare back and butt as she

Occasional "damn," "goddamn," and one use of "f--k

Adults get special cocktails when they arrive at t

Positive Messages

Not many overtly positive messages, but it does explore moral ambiguity of certain kinds of research, as well as importance of truth-telling within families and sticking together in difficult circumstances.

Positive Role Models

Guy and Prisca try to protect their kids and calm people when they can. Patricia and Jarin try to gather everyone, ask them to voice their feelings, work together. As a nurse, Jarin helps take care of everyone as they get sick and exhibit symptoms. Trent and Maddox are devoted siblings. Main cast is moderately racially/ethnically diverse, including an interracial couple (Black and Asian), a Black musician, two White families, a couple of BIPOC supporting characters. Everyone is heterosexual. Several characters have different chronic illnesses or invisible disabilities. A man seems to have early onset dementia but turns out to be schizophrenic and behaves in a way that's drawn from stereotypes about mental illness (he's homicidal).

Violence & Scariness

High body count: Characters succumb to everything from water (drowning) to one another (one person is stabbed to death, one is slashed but survives, another dies from blood poisoning). People have epileptic seizures, have emergency surgery, experience a host of other terrible things. Several dead bodies are shown; they decompose to bones and ash incredibly quickly.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief shot of a woman's bare back and butt as she undresses to swim in the nude. A woman flirts with a server. A married couple embraces and kisses. Teens hold each other; they have sex off camera and a teen girl gets pregnant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional "damn," "goddamn," and one use of "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults get special cocktails when they arrive at the resort.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan 's Old is a thriller that explores what happens when vacationing strangers are stranded on a beautiful beach that ages them at a remarkable rate. Like all of Shyamalan's movies, there are plot twists and turns, as well as a sustained sense of peril throughout. There's a considerably high body count, with several disturbing scenes of dead bodies/characters getting sick, a surprise pregnancy and birth, emergency surgery, and the implications of children growing into young adults in a matter of hours. Various characters have chronic illnesses that manifest themselves in frightening ways. While the only sex in the movie takes place off camera, there's kissing and a scene of a woman stripping to swim in the nude (her bare back and butt are visible). Language is fairly tame except for a few uses of "damn," "goddamn," and one "f--king." Adults get special cocktails. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Based on 15 parent reviews

Another great movie that makes us think from M. Knight Shyamalan

A wildly underrated thiller, what's the story.

M. Night Shyamalan 's creepy mystery/thriller OLD, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle , follows four groups of vacationing strangers who are visiting their resort's special private beach together for the day when they realize that something is going irrevocably wrong. A family of four -- dad Guy ( Gael García Bernal ), mom Prisca (Vicky Krieps), 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton), and 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) -- arrives at a tropical resort in an unspecified location. The manager recommends an exclusive excursion to a private nature preserve's nearby beach. They join a wealthy multigenerational family that includes an English chief of surgery ( Rufus Sewell ), his elderly mother (Kathleen Chalfant), trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), and their 5-year-old girl, Kara. They also realize that there's a single man there, whom tween Maddox identifies as rapper Mid-Sized Sedan ( Aaron Pierre ). Soon after, young Trent discovers a dead woman in the water: the fellow resort-goer who'd gone to the beach with Mid-Sized Sedan earlier in the day. A final married couple -- nurse Jarin ( Ken Leung ) and psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) -- appear amid the chaos, and it's soon clear that the beach has unthinkable effects on everyone. They're all aging approximately two years per hour, leading the kids to quickly morph into teen versions of Maddox ( Thomasin McKenzie ), Trent ( Alex Wolff ), and Kara ( Eliza Scanlen ).

Is It Any Good?

Shyamalan's thriller has a strong cast and an initially riveting concept, but it's uneven, and most of the best parts are revealed in the trailer. The performances are serviceable -- particularly Wolff, who's become an expert at the emotional range necessary for creepy horror/psychological thrillers. McKenzie is also notably good at portraying someone who's aged too quickly and is having trouble processing all of her complicated feelings. The adults range in effectiveness, with the striking Pierre (who's excellent in The Underground Railroad ) having little to do as the confused and quiet rapper, Sewell chewing up the scenery as an arrogant surgeon, and Bernal and Krieps trying to telegraph how a marriage on the rocks would react when faced with an unthinkable crisis. Stand-outs include Leung and Amuka-Bird, who play the story's sole likable and stable couple.

As in all of his films, Shyamalan also cast himself in a notable, more-than-cameo role, and, while it was predictable, he should have given himself an even smaller part. The twists here, once the titular premise is revealed, are underwhelming (and one is as obvious as Chekhov's gun). There's no gasp-worthy Sixth Sense or The Others moment, which is fine, but the "aha!" doesn't even matter much, because audiences may no longer be invested in the outcome. The best, freakiest parts of the movie rely mostly on the kids' accelerated growth, along with the physiological abnormalities that different characters face while aging a lot in one day (not a spoiler; it's right there in the title). Old ranks somewhere in the bottom half of Shyamalan's filmography, but even so it's worth a look -- if only to see the kids fast-forward into teens.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Old . How much takes place on screen vs. off? How does that affect the way you feel about it? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How does Old compare to Shyamalan's other movies? What are some of his movies' signature elements?

In this story, how do the diverse characters work together toward a common goal? Do they succeed? What do you think about the outcome?

Who, if anyone, do you consider a role model in the movie? What character strengths are on display?

Movie Details

In theaters : July 23, 2021
On DVD or streaming : October 19, 2021
Cast : Gael Garcia Bernal , Vicky Krieps , Embeth Davidtz , Thomasin McKenzie , Alex Wolff
Director : M. Night Shyamalan
Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female actors
Studio : Universal Pictures
Genre : Thriller
Topics : Brothers and Sisters
Run time : 108 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language
Last updated : December 27, 2023

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Adapted from Sandcastle , the graphic novel by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest mystery-thriller, Old , is different from the films he’s written and directed in the past. The film is less focused on the traditional horror elements, which is refreshing, even as it shifts towards a message that is underdeveloped when considering the big twist. Old has its moments of intrigue, of bodily horror, and themes surrounding the passage of time, but it’s too often bogged down by its tedious mystery.

Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are planning to separate and bring their kids, Trent (Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton), to the Anamika Resort for a last family vacation before everything in their life changes. When they and a few others — Jarin (Ken Leung), Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Charles (Rufus Sewell), and Chrystal (Abbey Lee) — are selected to visit a secluded beach for the day by the resort manager (Gustaf Hammersten), they quickly discover that time works differently there. Trapped with no hope of escape, the characters must figure out why they’ve been chosen and the reason they’re aging so rapidly.

Related: Old Trailer Reveals M. Night Shyamalan's Supernatural Thriller

Shyamalan builds tension and suspense with close-ups of the body — faces, knees, shoulders, eyes — when the characters are working through heightened emotions and changes to their situations. The camera pans away at every physical transformation, spanning the length of the beach before settling back on its subjects. This is exciting in the sense that the outcome of the movement is a surprise to the audience, as well as another predicament for the characters. It’s also a bold choice to film all the unfolding action during the day; as the sun goes down, the looming darkness is used to reflect on the precious time lost, the life choices made, and the affection that still lingers between Prisca and Guy’s family despite everything. There’s a deep sense of wasted time on anger and enjoying the time one has, even if Old doesn’t always pull it off because it waits too long to get to that point with the characters.

The dialogue is occasionally comical, especially when the characters are astonished by things they shouldn’t be — Prisca asks, in all seriousness, “Can you believe I found this place on the internet?” With so much of people’s time now spent online, where else would she have found the resort? However, the actors deliver their lines with such conviction, elevating the story and relationship dynamics that would have otherwise fallen flat. Old certainly nails the eerie, intense feelings that come with being trapped, of watching one’s life unfolding so quickly that it’s hard to think past the missed opportunities. As the characters grow older every half hour, the desperation and paranoia grows along with them, sometimes to dizzyingly intense degrees. That is where the thrills truly lie — how people can so quickly turn on each other because of things outside their control. The film’s sweet spot is right in the middle of its runtime, after the setup has been established, but before the reveal of what’s actually going on. This is where Shyamalan finds the balance between the story and its characters as he lingers on them and what this all means for their lives and the effects of their choices.

That said, the premise of the film is often more interesting than its execution. Aging is something society fears and avoids, with elderly abuse, age discrimination in the workforce, and the general negativity surrounding the loss of youth ever-present; the latter is on display with Chrystal, who values her youthful looks above all else. Conversely, for Trent and Maddox, what is it like to grow up too fast? When the mind of a six-year-old is suddenly a teenager with raging hormones, the impact on the body can be dangerous. To that end, Shyamalan is at least focused on the characters’ bodies, not in a creepy way, but in a fascinating, detailed close-up of its changes. Despite some of the good, Old doesn’t engage fully with the topics it sets up, including the aspect of the story introduced by the twist at the end, one that adds several more layers to the previous events. Typical of Shyamalan, the twist reframes the entirety of the film’s plot, but it’s one that will give pause regarding the exploitation of certain issues and how they’re perceived.

Sometimes, Old is bizarrely clinical despite its tension-building. When even the chills and thrills don’t work the way they should later on in the film, it leaves the audience waiting impatiently to get to the end for answers. There isn’t much time spent exploring the characters, with much of the quiet, reflective moments being relegated to the end. It doesn’t quite land an emotional punch because the plot is far more dedicated to maintaining the mystery, one that drags on unnecessarily and doesn’t provide much insight since it comes too late. The film’s primary message is tacked on at the end, with Shyamalan only dipping into the shallow end of the repercussions. So while Old is certainly a different kind of thriller, with plenty of elements that work to create a sense of tranquility and desperation in equal measure, it grows wearisome as it evades its deeper themes for the thrill of that final discovery.

Next: How Old Is Different From M. Night Shyamalan's Other Movies

Old is releasing in theaters on the evening of Thursday, July 22. The film is 108 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language.

Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old is a chilling, mysterious new thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly - reducing their entire lives into a single day.

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‘Old’ Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Thriller Doesn’t Age Well

David ehrlich.

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Life is quite literally a beach in M. Night Shyamalan ’s “ Old ,” a go-for-broke “Twilight Zone” riff about a family who find themselves trapped in a sandy enclave where time passes so fast that a six-year-old in the morning will go through puberty by lunch, and a grandmother in the first act has almost no chance of being around for the third. Borrowed from the 2010 graphic novel “Sandcastle” by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, it’s the sort of unsettling idea that can trigger a wave of existential anxieties (and/or parental ones, which are often the same thing) just by thinking about it.

And yet Shyamalan’s very silly new movie — his best since “The Village,” but still a pale imitation of the slow-burn psychological thrillers that once earned him modern history’s most iconic Newsweek cover — isn’t nearly as fraught-provoking as its nature would suggest. Rather than allow this story to unfold at the real-time pace that its premise demands, Shyamalan opts instead for a hurried (if impressively perverse) series of cheap thrills that emphasize the body horror of aging over the more profound terror of feeling the years pass by.

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The result is a silly, well-acted piece of schlock that offers a decent time at the movies instead of the awful one that it promised us. And while there’s obviously some fun to be had in a film where “The Neon Demon” star Abbey Lee plays a trophy wife who goes full “Kuroneko” (complete with a billowing hooded kimono) on a bunch of teens because she gets a few wrinkles, Shyamalan’s latest — like virtually everyone in it — gets old fast.

Subtlety has never been one of Shyamalan’s gifts, but “Old” is so obvious that even Rod Serling would probably tell M. Night to dial it back a bit. We meet the bickering Capa family as they arrive at the tropical resort that mom Prisca found on the internet one day (she’s played by Vicky Krieps , who sets the tone for a movie in which every member of the cast is wonderfully overqualified), and the snippy conversation they have in the van makes it hard to believe that such ostensibly smart people could be stupid enough not to realize they’re in a campy horror movie.

Every single line of dialogue is the Shyamalan equivalent of a slasher victim announcing that they’re just gonna lose their virginity in the spooky garage real quick, but they’ll definitely be right back after that. “You have such a beautiful voice,” Guy Capa ( Gael García Bernal ) tells his pre-teen daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton), “I can’t wait to hear it when you’re older.” A beat later, he turns to his younger child Trent (Nolan River) and regretfully informs him that he’s too young to scuba. For his part, Trent is a hyper-loquacious adult man trapped in a six-year-old’s body; he sizes up his weary mother and declares, “The spontaneity has been stripped from her.”

It would be a funnier bit if not for the fact that all of Shyamalan’s characters talk as if they’ve been abducted by aliens, a feeling that’s only enhanced by this film’s clinical framing and zoological sense of remove. “You’re always thinking about the future!” Prisca snarls at her actuary husband as soon as they get a moment alone inside of their glass villa. “You’re always thinking about the past!” Guy snaps back at his museum curator wife. “You work in a god damn museum!” Listen closely, and you can all but hear the aliens excitedly scribbling away in their notes.

Okay, maybe aliens aren’t to blame for this one. After all, it’s Shyamalan himself — once again cameoing as the instrument of his characters’ suffering — who drives the Capa family to the special private beach where they’ll get to spend the day with just a small handful of other lucky resort guests. And never let it be said that Shyamalan doesn’t have a gift for creating memorably bizarre redshirts, most of whom are so wooden and broadly sketched that it’s more believable to hear them compare notes about the temporal properties of the beach’s rock wall than it would be to watch them buy groceries.

OLD, from left: Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff, 2021. © Universal Pictures /Courtesy Everett Collection

Half the fun of “Old” comes from seeing world-class actors try to wiggle out of Shyamalan’s writing like straitjacketed magicians in an underwater vault. British smarm machine Rufus Sewell has the time of his life as a cardiothoracic surgeon whose mental health deteriorates faster than his body, and it’s worth the price of admission just to witness the character’s strange fixation on a certain Marlon Brando movie (especially because it’s definitely not the one you’d guess). “The Neon Demon” star Abbey Lee makes a meal out of Sewell’s young trophy wife. Aaron Pierre, in a wild change of pace from his earth-shaking lead performance in “The Underground Railroad,” shows off his versatility in the role of an emotionally grounded rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Shyamalan is just raining threes with that one). Neither the great Ken Leung nor Nikki Amuka-Bird get quite as much to do in their roles as a kindly nurse and his seizure-prone wife, but they manage to find the integrity of every scene they’re in even when Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know where it went.

For all of its clumsiness, however, there’s no doubt that “Old” is supposed to be funny, even if Shyamalan reliably earns more laughs from our discomfort than he does from his own zingers. The film is full of guffaw-worthy beats that start with your hand over your mouth and end with your head shaking in your hands. Does Prisca only wrap her mind around the time-bending premise when she notices her son’s newly bulging genitals? Of course. Is that the most “I can’t believe he went there” moment in a Shyamalan movie where Maddox and a young girl he meets age into Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen as their child-like intellects are transplanted into the bodies of horny teenage virgins? Of course not. They don’t give Oscars for how brilliantly Scanlen navigates the strangeness of being a child and an adult at the same time, but maybe they should.

There are other sorts of gross-out moments in store for you, most of which ironically prove effective because of Shyamalan’s visual restraint. The aging effects are subtle enough that the other effects — a twisted limb here, an impromptu surgery there — are able to draft off their residual verisimilitude, which goes a long way in a movie that fails to sustain much interest in the mystery behind its horrors, but still builds to a coda that explains them all in imagination-deflating detail. “Old” insists that trying to flip the hourglasses of our lives is a futile waste of the brief time we get in this world, and there’s something vaguely poignant about watching these characters make peace with that idea and/or die trying. But the emotional undertow of Shyamalan’s story feels grafted onto a film that scurries from one supernatural nightmare to the next so fast that none of them feel rooted in a place of shared reality.

Scary as it is to imagine how your body and all of its ailments might go haywire if you sped through 10 years in the span of five hours — and sick as that can be to watch — Shyamalan completely fails to connect such horrors to the mortal fears we live with every day. Shyamalan understands that nobody gets out alive, but he never wraps his head around why everyone keeps trying. The central point of his film eventually comes to double as the biggest knock against it: If life were really so short, it would be easier to appreciate the time that we’re given. By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

Universal Pictures will release “Old” in theaters on Friday, July 23.

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“old” movie review: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

One of my favorite things about Old was the overall premise of the movie. M. Night Shyamalan clearly put a lot of thought behind the workings of the beach and why the resort would partake in this experiment. Another strong suit would be the special effects make-up, which was very well-done and visually interesting. Aaron Pierre had the strongest presence in the movie despite being a supporting role. I credit this to the actor rather than the writing because his lines were not anything special, but Pierre did great with his delivery. His character, Mid-Sized Sedan, a rapper with a rare blood clotting disorder had depth and personality. Unfortunately, this is something the other characters lacked.

Aaron Pierre as Mid-Sized Sedan in “Old”

Old had barely any character development. It centered around eleven people with deep and complex histories. Yet, it really didn’t explore their family dynamics and character motivations. The film briefly discussed medical conditions and divorces, but other than that left the audience in the dark. Another disappointing aspect of the movie was the acting. While it wasn’t completely awful, it was definitely dry. The actors’ emotions and reactions did not match the intensity of the situation. But I don’t think this was necessarily the cast’s fault, as the script was undoubtedly the worst part of the movie.

Old' review: M. Night Shyamalan's latest is a bonkers mess - Los Angeles Times

Left to Right: Aaron Pierre, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, and Abbey Lee Kershaw

The script was uninspiring, emotionless, and boring. Most of the lines had the characters stoically announcing the events unraveling in the movie. The scene in particular that left me especially disappointed was when Prisca described how there was a doctor on the beach and that she needs to get the doctor to make sure the rapidly aging children are okay. Not only is this painfully obvious, but she had also been attempting this for the past twenty minutes before this spiel. It was an unnecessary addition that actually took away from the movie. Instead of giving Vicky Krieps the opportunity to portray an emotional and loving mother, they reduced her character to simply narrating the current events. This was a reoccurring problem in the movie as the characters lacked development and emotions.

Old: M. Night Shyamalan's Twist Ending Explained - Den of Geek

Thomasin Mackenzie and Alex Wolff who portrayed the aged Maddox and Trent

Final Verdict:

I give the movie a 5/10. The plot is interesting enough to hold attention, and the scenery and effects are very well-done. But it wasn’t enough to make up for the lazy writing which negatively affected the movie. I was extremely excited for Old upon seeing the trailer but was left disappointed. The premise had so much potential but unfortunately turned out to be sub-par.

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Refrain from posting comments that are obscene, defamatory or inflammatory, and do not indulge in personal attacks, name calling or inciting hatred against any community. Help us delete comments that do not follow these guidelines by marking them offensive . Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

What is the release date of 'Old'? Release date of Thomasin Mckenzie and Rufus Sewell starrer 'Old' is 2021-07-23.
Who are the actors in 'Old'? 'Old' star cast includes Thomasin Mckenzie, Rufus Sewell, Embeth Davidtz and Abbey Lee.
Who is the director of 'Old'? 'Old' is directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
What is Genre of 'Old'? 'Old' belongs to 'Thriller' genre.
In Which Languages is 'Old' releasing? 'Old' is releasing in English and Hindi.

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2 children dead in stabbing attack in British seaside town

9 other children and 2 adults wounded, police say.

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Bloodied children ran screaming from a dance and yoga class "like a scene from a horror movie" to escape a teenager's savage knife attack that killed two children and wounded 11 other people Monday in northwest England, police and witnesses said.

A 17-year-old male was arrested on suspicion of murder and attempted murder in the stabbing in Southport, a seaside town near Liverpool, Merseyside Police said. The motive was not clear, but police said detectives were not treating the attack as terror-related.

Nine children were among the wounded — six of them in critical condition.

Two adults were also left in critical condition, police said.

"We believe the adults who were injured were bravely trying to protect the children who were being attacked," Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said.

The attack was the latest amid a recent rise in knife crime in the U.K. that has stoked anxieties and led to calls for the government to do more to clamp down on bladed weapons.

A woman wearing a protective suit and holding a clipboard walks along a sidewalk. There is police tape in the foreground.

The Taylor Swift-themed workshop was held on the first week of school vacation for children aged about six to 11. The two-hour session was led by two women — a yoga instructor and a dance instructor — according to an online listing.

Witnesses described hearing blood-curdling screams and seeing children covered in blood emerging from the business that hosts everything from pregnancy workshops and meditation sessions to women's bootcamps.

"They were in the road, running from the nursery," said Bare Varathan, who owns a shop nearby. "They had been stabbed here, here, here, everywhere," he said, indicating the neck, back and chest.

'Horrendous and deeply shocking'

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer called the attack "horrendous and deeply shocking."

Police were called shortly before noon to a street where several small businesses are located behind rows of brick houses in Southport, a city of about 100,000.

The first officers who arrived were shocked to find so many casualties from the "ferocious attack," most of them children with serious injuries, Kennedy said.

Stabbing attack kills 2 children in U.K.

Colin Parry, an auto body shop owner, said most of the victims appeared to be young girls.

"The mothers are coming here now and screaming," Parry said. "It is like a scene from a horror movie.... It's like something from America, not like sunny Southport."

The suspect, who has not been identified, lived in a village about eight kilometres from the site of the attack, police said . He was originally from Cardiff, Wales.

Know What’s Funny About Getting Old? These Movies Do.

Star-studded with leading ladies, who are all a bit older, recent comedies like “The Fabulous Four” and “80 for Brady” are establishing a popular new genre.

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Susan Sarandon and Megan Mullally sitting across from Sheryl Lee Ralph and Bette Midler in a carriage in a scene from the movie “The Fabulous Four.” Midler wears a wedding dress with a veil.

By Esther Zuckerman

There are two new films this year in which Academy Award-nominated actresses in their 70s whip out tiny sex toys. In “Summer Camp,” Kathy Bates offers up wee vibrators to Alfre Woodard and Diane Keaton. In “The Fabulous Four,” it’s Bette Midler giving Susan Sarandon a kegel ball that she later flings at a bike thief.

You might confuse these comedies with “Book Club” (2018), where Keaton, again, finds herself in the company of fellow older luminaries (Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Candice Bergen). Or with “Poms” (2019), which places Keaton on a retirement community cheer squad with Jacki Weaver, Rhea Perlman and Pam Grier. Then, again, there’s also “80 for Brady” (2023), where Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sally Field and Rita Moreno go to the Super Bowl.

Though the circumstances are different, the similarities in plot, casting and themes make the films easy to classify but tough to label. “Legendary ladies of cinema do a light romp,” is a little long; “Old lady comedies” might seem demeaning, but that is, essentially, how the films identify themselves. In the “80 for Brady” trailer , Moreno sums it up by saying: “The Super Bowl is no place for four old women.”

Regardless of the label, this growing genre of star-studded comedies has become popular in recent years, with “Four,” which hit theaters on Friday, becoming the latest installment in the canon.

You can usually see the same types of characters in each film. At least one of the women is a stick in the mud. In “The Fabulous Four” that’s Sarandon’s job. As Lou, she’s a serious doctor who loves cats and is holding a grudge against Midler’s character over a long-ago offense. Often Keaton, with her turtlenecks, is the most uptight of her group. And Fonda, when she appears, plays sexually adventurous characters, prone to making off-color jokes. Megan Mullally has that gig in “Four,” with an assist from the famously bawdy Midler. There are usually high jinks involving behavior that one might not expect from seniors. They get high. They go on adventurous excursions like parasailing or ziplining. They experiment with technology and social media. (“The Fabulous Four” has a whole bit about Midler on TikTok.)

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The Most Mesmerizing Moments of the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony

Image may contain Architecture Building Eiffel Tower Landmark and Tower

The 2024 Paris Olympics have had a lot to recommend them: an array of impossibly beautiful backdrops ; a starry cast of commentators, including the likes of Alex Cooper and Snoop Dogg; and competitors like Simone Biles , Sha’Carri Richardson , Katie Ledecky, and Coco Gauff who viewers everywhere are thrilled to get behind.

It was only fitting, then, that the Games should begin in spectacular fashion. French theater director Thomas Jolly helmed an opening ceremony unlike any the Games had seen before, unfolding along the River Seine with all manner of top-tier performers on hand to animate the route.

As a crowd including Sarah Jessica Parker, Tom Cruise, Mick Jagger, Pharrell Williams, Christopher Meloni, Elizabeth Banks, John Legend, Chrissy Teigen, Greta Gerwig, and thousands upon thousands of Parisians looked on, these were some of the very best moments of the Paris 2024 opening ceremony:

The start of the procession

Image may contain Arch Architecture Smoke Water and Waterfront

After an extended prologue that showed famed French soccer coach and former player Zinedine Zidane—also known as Zizou—ferrying the Olympic torch from the Stade de France to the Seine, the ceremony proper began with a bang. An explosion of bleu, blanc, and rouge raining over the Austerlitz Bridge gave way to the (waterborne) parade of nations, starting, as ever, with the Greek delegation.

Lady Gaga turning the Seine into a cabaret

Image may contain Architecture Building House Housing Staircase Adult Person People Clothing Footwear and Shoe

“Bonsoir, bienvenue en Paris!” Lady Gaga cried as she kicked off her long-rumored performance at the opening ceremony, doing a joyous rendition of Zizi Jeanmaire’s classic standard “Mon Truc En Plume.” Surrounded by dancers wielding flamingo pink pom-poms, Gaga was dressed in Dior Haute Couture.

The sense of theater—and the heavy metal

Jolly’s opening ceremony drew on all kinds of performing arts, stitching together musical phrases from The Phantom of the Opera , Les Misérables , Georges Bizet’s Carmen , and a thrilling set by the French heavy-metal band Gojira at the Conciergerie. (Later on, in another engaging display of Paris’s cultural diversity, the rapper Rim’K, wearing a checkered jacket by Louis Vuitton, performed his song “King.”)

The teeming world of la danse was accounted for too: A troupe of modern dancers splashed near Notre-Dame, acrobats flew over the Pont Neuf, and Guillaume Diop—the first Black principal dancer at the Paris Opera Ballet—did a lyrical solo.

Aya Nakamura seizing the Pont des Arts

Aya Nakamura , wearing a feathery gold Dior Haute Couture mini, gave a rousing performance of her hit 2018 singles “Pookie” and “Djadja.” She was joined by a gaggle of dancers (also in Dior), as well as the Orchestre de la Garde Républicaine.

Take a closer look at her dress below:

The “Jeux d’eau” in the rain

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French pianist Alexandre Kantorow gave a gorgeous performance of one of Ravel’s best-known pieces for piano—variously translated as “Fountains,” “Playing Water,” or “Water Games”—as the rain came down in Paris.

Axelle Saint-Cirel singing from the roof of the Grand Palais

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The Parisian mezzo-soprano was a vision as she sang a stirring new arrangement of “La Marseillaise,” the national anthem of France. Her prettily draped, eight-meter-long dress, also by Dior Haute Couture, was actually of a piece with the French flag she brandished.

The fashion show!

The likes of Farida Khelfa, Ines Rau, and drag queen Nicky Doll turned a footbridge over the Seine into their catwalk during a segment of the ceremony inspired by the fashion industry’s deep roots in the French capital.

The stirring performance of “Imagine”

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Continuing a charming tradition at the Games, French singer-songwriter Juliette Armanet performed John Lennon’s classic ballad from a boat on the Seine, accompanied by Sofiane Pamart on a flaming piano.

The scene at the Trocadero…and then at the Tuileries

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After a glowing mechanical horse carrying the Olympic flag flew down the Seine—and images and videos from Olympics past were spliced together into a rather affecting highlights reel, representing the achievements of athletes from around the world—a mysterious cloaked figure marched solemnly down the Trocadero, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, before the Olympic hymn played.

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Then, following remarks from Tony Estanguet, president of Paris 2024, and Thomas Bach, the president of the International Olympic Committee, king of clay Rafael Nadal, Carl Lewis, Nadia Comăneci, and Serena Williams boarded a boat with the Olympic torch—headed in the opposite direction. Where were they going? To meet tennis legend Amélie Mauresmo, who, after a jog up to the Louvre, passed the torch on to a series of athletes, including former basketball player Tony Parker, former handball players Michaël Guigou and Allison Pineau, and 100-year-old former cyclist Charles Coste.

At the end of the relay were former sprinter Marie-José Pérec and judoka Teddy Riner, who lit up an enormous hot-air balloon in the Tuileries Garden.

Céline Dion performing from the Eiffel Tower

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Dressed in a shimmering beaded Dior Haute Couture dress, Dion—who, as some may recall, sang “The Power of the Dream” at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta—made a much-anticipated appearance to perform “L’Hymne à l’Amour,” a song popularized by Edith Piaf in the 1950s. In so doing, she brought an utterly unforgettable opening ceremony to a thoroughly moving conclusion.

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After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana journeys to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she has ever... Read all After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana journeys to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she has ever faced. After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana journeys to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she has ever faced.

David G. Derrick Jr.
Dana Ledoux Miller
Ron Clements
John Musker
Auli'i Cravalho
Dwayne Johnson
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Trivia Originally began as a television series in 2020, with plans for the series to air on Disney+. In February 2024, the series was transformed into a theatrical sequel.

[from trailer]

Moana : Maui?

Maui : [picks up Hei Hei] Boat snack!

[Pua falls into his other hand]

Maui : Boat snack upgrade! Bacon *and* eggs?

[Pua snorts]

Maui : Why didn't you bring the pig last time?

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COMMENTS

Old movie review & film summary (2021)
Rod Serling would have loved it. And "Old" is very effective when Shyamalan is being playful and quick with his high concept. "Old" doesn't really feel like a traditional mystery. I never once cared about "figuring out" what was happening to this crew, enjoying "Old" far more as surreal horror than as a thriller that demanded ...
M. Night Shyamalan's 'Old': Film Review
Director-screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan. Rated PG-13, 1 hour 48 minutes. Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps play Guy and Prisca, parents who want to take their kids Trent and Maddox (Nolan ...
Old
Jul 26, 2023 Full Review Manuel São Bento MSB Reviews Old is one of those cases of a remarkably unique, intriguing ... English. Release Date (Theaters) Jul 23, 2021, Wide. Release Date (Streaming)
Old brings out the best and worst in M Night Shyamalan
Old feels like a repeat of Shyamalan's 2004 film The Village - it's provocative and inventive right until the point the director retreats into narrative neatness and conventional emotions.
"Old," Reviewed: M. Night Shyamalan's New Old-School Sci-Fi Movie
Richard Brody reviews the new film "Old," written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan and starring Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, and others.
Old review: M. Night Shyamalan returns with a floppy but haunting ...
There's Guy (Gael García Bernal) and his wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps), whose marriage is on the rocks, and their two young children: 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and his 11-year-old sister ...
M. Night Shyamalan 'Old' Movie Review
M. Night Shyamalan knows you're thinking: Wait for it. And, Everything is a clue. He knows that, ever since The Sixth Sense, with its late-stage, near-spontaneous clicking into place of ...
Old Review
Old isn't M. Night Shyamalan's best work, but it is one that shows maturity - a movie that tackles universal and intense themes over twists and puzzles.
Old Review: M. Night Shaymalan's Latest Is A Fun And ...
Old is actually the first film that sees writer/director M. Night Shyamalan completely move away from his usual home base of Philadelphia. While the town still plays a role in the film's ...
'Old' Movie Review: M. Night Shyamalan's New Horror Film
M. Night Shyamalan's Old is beautifully made and terribly written. The Sixth Sense director still has a way with sinister shots, but is oddly invested in having the audience care about his ...
'Old' Review: They Say Sun Can Age You, but This Is Ridiculous
July 22, 2021. Old. Directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Drama, Mystery, Thriller. PG-13. 1h 48m. Find Tickets. When you purchase a ticket for an independently reviewed film through our site, we earn ...
Old Movie Review
Parents Need to Know. Parents need to know that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's Old is a thriller that explores what happens when vacationing strangers are stranded on a beautiful beach that ages them at a remarkable rate. Like all of Shyamalan's movies, there are plot twists and turns, as well as a sustained sense of peril….
Old Review: M. Night Shyamalan's Mystery Is Tedious, But Intense
Adapted from Sandcastle, the graphic novel by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, M. Night Shyamalan's latest mystery-thriller, Old, is different from the films he's written and directed in the past.The film is less focused on the traditional horror elements, which is refreshing, even as it shifts towards a message that is underdeveloped when considering the big twist.
Old Review: M. Night Shyamalan's Latest Thriller Doesn't Age Well
Life's a beach in M. Night Shyamalan's well-cast new movie, which never finds a way to follow through on its skin-crawling premise. Life is quite literally a beach in M. Night Shyamalan 's ...
100 Best Classic Movies of All Time
The Wages of Fear (1953)100%. #18. Critics Consensus: An existential suspense classic, The Wages of Fear blends nonstop suspense with biting satire; its influence is still being felt on today's thrillers. Synopsis: In the South American jungle, supplies of nitroglycerine are needed at a remote oil field.
"Old" Movie Review: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
The film briefly discussed medical conditions and divorces, but other than that left the audience in the dark. Another disappointing aspect of the movie was the acting. While it wasn't completely awful, it was definitely dry. The actors' emotions and reactions did not match the intensity of the situation. But I don't think this was ...
Old English
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Old (film)
Old is a 2021 American body horror thriller film written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan.It is based on the French-language Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy [] and Frederik Peeters.The film features an ensemble cast consisting of Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Ken Leung, Eliza ...
Old Movie: Showtimes, Review, Songs, Trailer, Posters, News & Videos
Old is a English movie released on 23 Jul, 2021. The movie is directed by M. Night Shyamalan and featured Thomasin Mckenzie, Rufus Sewell, Embeth Davidtz and Abbey Lee as lead characters.
Movie reviews and ratings by Film Critic Roger Ebert
Movie reviews and ratings by Film Critic Roger Ebert | Roger Ebert. Movie Reviews TV/Streaming Collections Chaz's Journal Great Movies Interviews Contributors Dìdi (弟弟) Sean Wang's feature directorial debut is an effortless coming of age story. Now playing. The Fabulous Four Nell Minow
2 children dead in stabbing attack in British seaside town
Bloodied children ran screaming from a dance and yoga class "like a scene from a horror movie" to escape a teenager's savage knife attack that killed two children and wounded 11 other people ...
Know What's Funny About Getting Old? These Movies Do
From left: Susan Sarandon, Megan Mullally, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Bette Midler in "The Fabulous Four." Casting and themes make films like this one, with older characters, easy to classify but ...
The Most Mesmerizing Moments of the Paris 2024 Opening Ceremony
French theater director Thomas Jolly helmed an opening ceremony unlike any the Games had seen before, unfolding along the River Seine with all manner of top-tier performers (Lady Gaga! Aya Nakamura!
AV Club
The 8 best Shudder original movies streaming right now By Richard Newby October 21, 2022 | 2:00pm; Celebrate Christmas with the subversive 1940s rom-com that turned gender roles on their head By ...
Moana 2 (2024)
Moana 2: Directed by David G. Derrick Jr., Jason Hand, Dana Ledoux Miller. With Auli'i Cravalho, Dwayne Johnson, Alan Tudyk, Nicole Scherzinger. After receiving an unexpected call from her wayfinding ancestors, Moana journeys to the far seas of Oceania and into dangerous, long-lost waters for an adventure unlike anything she has ever faced.

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Old Review: M. Night Shaymalan’s Latest Is A Fun And Frightening Thrill Ride

Away from the familiar territory of Philadelphia, Old opens up M. Night Shyamalan’s visual scope to great effect.

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With another M. Night Shyamalan ending fans will be talking about, Old is absolute summer fun.

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