Old (2021): It's Like The Happening But Worse!

M. Night Shyamalan has done it again. And by “done it,” I mean he made a bad movie, folks.

I’d like to think we’ve become somewhat more forgiving in our time making this show, but sometimes we come across films that are so hilariously misguided that we can’t help but razz. This is one of those endlessly razzable films.

What Makes “Old” So Bad?

First off, the title is the worst! The movie is based on a 2010 graphic novel called Sandcastle by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy, which, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, has an infinitely better title. And that’s not where the superiorities end—Sandcastle is controversial, sure, but it’s also perfectly executed. Hate it or love it, the graphic novel knows exactly what it is and delivers to a tee.

The basic idea is pretty straightforward: a handful of families find themselves on a private beach that they quickly discover is a) making them age roughly 2 years per hour and b) is inescapable. The graphic novel acts more as a fable than a traditional novel—nothing about the situation is explained, and the story instead chooses to focus on the emotional and social repercussions of rapid aging. It explores the consequences of building emotional walls between ourselves and others, the discomfort we have with nature and death, the meaning of legacy, and the fruitlessness of many of our society’s preoccupations, all within 112 pages of stark illustration. The biggest complaints are generally from people who are outraged at the idea of quickly maturing children discovering sex rather than the writing or presentation, which baffles me, but hey. Sometimes folks don’t want to see their own discomfort reflected back at them. Sincerely their loss, but I digress.

M. Night Shyamalan takes the most interesting ideas in Sandcastle and bleeds them dry of any originality or creativity. Rather than keep the sense of mystery and allegory, he instead overexplains every minute detail to the point where even his own explanations contradict each other. He takes the novel’s thesis—that people can and should break down their defenses when they face reality—and reduces it to an exercise in mindless gore and violence with zero emotional depth. The characters exist as flat planes upon which Shyamalan foists his own unimaginative and reductive beliefs about human nature. It baffles me that, in a story SOLELY about character interaction and development, he chooses to prioritize shocking imagery over everything else. It was so bitterly disappointing.

Damn, That’s Like Everything About the Movie

YEAH. And the details make it even worse. The dialogue is barely human (example: “The dog just fell over!” “What? But it was only just alive!”), the explanation of the core premise is ridiculous and unsatisfying, it’s impossible to care about any of the characters—it just feels like a series of half baked scenes that have little to do with one another. Y’all, a baby dies from “a lack of attention” like 2 seconds after being born. A woman claims that rust acts like a poison in the bloodstream. The same woman has a tumor removed from her body by the rest of the cast holding the incision open so it doesn’t heal over, but manages to not get an infection? There’s so much. SO much.

Was There Anything Good?

The only moment in the entire movie that was legitimately compelling was a minute-long conversation between a woman and her daughter about why the mother cheated on her husband. It was an emotionally nuanced moment that addressed the complexities of marriage, falling out of love, and terminal illnesses without falling into the trap of overexplaining or vilifying. But it was over almost as soon as it began, and the scene came far too late to warrant genuinely caring about what she had to say.

I will say that I had a fabulous time making fun of it, though. I cried laughing at one point when a woman, who had previously been established as having immense vanity and a calcium deficiency, hides herself away because she’s old and ugly now and is discovered by the now-adult children towards the end of the movie. She throws rocks at them to get them to go away, but one of them proves too heavy and crushes her shoulder. What follows is a 2-minute scene of this woman’s bones shattering under the pressure of walking/moving at all—so much so that, by the end of the scene, she’s flailing and wriggling around on the ground to move toward the kids, all while her limbs break into smaller and smaller pieces until she’s cocooned in her own body parts and finally dies. I’m not joking. She breaks her bones to death. It’s insane.

I can’t say I recommend watching this atrocity, but it made for an entertaining morning with the roommates. I’m sure you could pair it with a nice wine and pass a Friday night. I can’t believe I watched it sober. I need a nap.