Old (2021)

Originally reviewed on October 26, 2021

M. Night Shyamalan films have a mixed track record. I feel I write that about every M. Night film but it's true. He reached his career height with films like The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable and I still like Signs but then he sunk to a career low with the dull After Earth but has been on a steady return to form with his last couple of films and this film seemed to be going back to basics. A simple story that doesn't rely on computer graphics.The set up of the film is that a family arrives at a tropical beach resort and on an excursion they arrive at a beach that ages them quickly.

When they eventually decide to try and leave the beach, they are brought back to the sea so that explains why they can't leave although it took them an awfully long time before they attempted this. This film is based on a graphic novel which I confess I haven't read so I don't know how much this film deviates from the source material but I am hoping that there aren't as many characters as there are in this film because a problem that this film has is that there are too many people in the film. Too many people that we are supposed to follow and yet there need to be extra people to die in these films but there were just too many central characters.

There is a nice mystery at the heart of the film but the thing about mysteries is that you have to start dropping some hints about what's going on and M. Night never does this. Plenty of strange things happen but we never get any idea of what's going on until the end by which point I have really stopped caring and just want some answers.

Of course M. Night has to have a cameo as the coach driver but then towards the end of the film its revealed he is part of some sort of experiment where the resort is a front for a science research base that are using people on the island to test medicines on illnesses. It explained why so many people in the film had illnesses. Prisca had a stomach tumour, Chrystal has hypocalcemia, Charles who has Schizophrenia and Patricia who has epilepsy .The ‘surprise’ that Trent and Maddox survived wasn't really a surprise but served as a satisfactory way for things to wrap up at the end.

This film is one that could have lost about 30 minutes. I checked the clock timer at one point thinking that I was close to the film but discovered that only 1 hour and 20 minutes had passed. I think if this were 80-90 minutes long then the whole film would have moved along at a much better rate. I don't think it is a great film but its nowhere near as bad as After Earth but with a few tweaks, this could have been a good horror film. I wasn't really interested in things until we got off the beach which is in the final 10-15 minutes. I think this film is going to bore a lot of people but if your prepared to stick with it until the end then at least you will be satisfied.