'Old' Is the First Great Covid Movie
This week, we're taking a trip to the beach that makes you old.
Spoilers ahead for Old, the movie about the beach that makes you old.
Every time M. Night Shyamalan releases a movie, the question on everyone’s lips is the same: “Is there a twist?” The answer for Old, his new thriller, is the same as it’s been the last few: Well, sort of. Yes, there’s enough of a final revelation that the literal hundreds upon hundreds of “Every M. Night Twist, Ranked!” clickbait articles will find room to be updated. But Shyamalan has always been much more than a twist-ending guy, and Old is much more than its twist. Buried under the sand of its relentless pace and offbeat comedy, Shyamalan has managed to tell the first truly effective story about what it’s felt like to live through the last eighteen months.
In case the memes haven’t gotten through to you, Old is about a mysterious beach that induces rapid aging in a vacationing family (Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, and two young children who eventually settle into the forms of Thomasin Mackenzie and Alex Wolff). It’s a simple, surreal premise that Shyamalan milks for all the body horror it’s worth. A previously benign tumor grows to the size of a cantaloupe and must be removed; a child grows up, gets pregnant, and gives birth within a matter of minutes; one calcium-deficient character breaks and reheals every bone in her body until she’s a tangled snarl of protruding limbs.
But far scarier than any of these individual moments is the knowledge that time is not on our characters’ side; in fact, it’s in direct opposition, passing by so quickly that it becomes literally horrific. Shyamalan and cinematographer Mike Gioulakis twirl their camera around the beach so quickly it starts to feel like a pendulum, ticking away the hours and stealing away the years. When Krieps first sees that her children have aged into, well, entirely different actors, Shyamalan blocks the scene so that the children are out of focus, adrift on the sidelines as their mother tends to a crisis beyond their understanding. When she turns to see them, so do we, and her sense of dread nearly bleeds off the screen. What is she missing? Where did the time go?
Shyamalan has flirted with this kind of storytelling before; The Happening, the critical nadir of his career, was widely interpreted as a response to the September 11th attacks. While that film has enjoyed a bit of a reevaluation lately for its B-movie charms, it stumbles in its truly unsettling depiction of mass suicide, imagery that feels too directly ripped from tragedy to hit its mark. Old never resorts to hacking coughs or trite references to the events of the past year; the closest its metaphor gets to explicit is the moment its adult children mourn the many memories they’ll never get to have, from prom to high school graduation. Its characters introduce themselves alongside their occupations, clinging onto vestiges of identity that they can feel slipping away through the hourglass. Life is passing by too quickly, and they’re helpless to stop it.
Back in 2002, before the release of Signs, Newsweek Magazine ran an infamous story about Shyamalan, with a cover image that saw the words THE NEXT SPIELBERG emblazoned across his chest. It was an impossible burden to lay at the then-31-year-old’s feet. Already one of Hollywood’s highest-paid filmmakers, he was suddenly also branded one of its smuggest (Shyamalan doesn’t compare himself to Spielberg once in the published story). By the time of his disastrous one-two-three punch of Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender, he was a critical punching bag. The Newsweek cover became an even bigger joke, for all the wrong reasons.
Shyamalan was never the next Spielberg, and he shouldn’t be. In this most recent stage of his career, self-funding meager budgets in exchange for creative control, he’s evolved into something far more interesting than simply a shiny clone of an existing, great filmmaker. Old isn’t perfect. It has all of its director’s existing quirks; it’s shaggy and misshapen. It has moments of agony and awkwardness, and moments of pure beauty. It’s a lot like the last year of our lives.
There have already been films that try to tackle the last year explicitly; there will almost certainly be more, assuming Adam McKay doesn’t pass away in some kind of tragic scarf accident. But Old succeeds because it doesn’t have to be explicit. It doesn’t bother to separate the horrific parts of life from the banal, the agony from the inconvenience. It all exists side by side. The final scene on Old’s beach sees Krieps and Bernal’s bickering couple come to a bittersweet reconciliation. “What was it we were arguing about?” Bernal asks. “Never mind. I don’t remember.” They exchange a light smile and pass away, leaning into each other. It’s a gorgeous moment. As time gets away from them, they relinquish control and find their moment of tranquility in the present, in each other. Isn’t that all any of us can ask for?
What’s worth watching this week: Escape Room: Tournament of Champions is the only worthwhile sequel in theaters right now. Escape Room is the great blockbuster franchise of our time.