Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Old’ on HBO Max, M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Howler of a Thriller

Now on HBO Max, Old finds M. Night Shyamalan getting back to his old tricks. We love the love-him-or-hate-him director for The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and maybe Signs, and hate him for the unholy trinity of The Happening, The Last Airbender and After Earth, the latter marking the critical and popular bottoming-out of his career. He staged a solid comeback with low-budget horror film The Visit and nifty Unbreakable-tied thriller Split (followed by the unsatisfying Glass) — and now he’s back to the self-contained thriller-with-a-twist via Old, which incorporates elements of horror, mystery and suspense just like his greatest influence, Hitchcock. But make no mistake, this is full-on Shyamalan — for better or worse.

OLD: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The Cappa family is on vacation! Mom Priscia (Vicky Krieps) found this luxury resort in an unidentified tropical setting online, so she and dad Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) agreed to book a few days as one last hurrah before they shatter their family by getting divorced. Maddox (Alexa Swinton) is 11 and Trent (Nolan River) is six; she seems OK and he likes to walk around the poolside lounge and ask all the adults what they’re names and occupations are, like all kids love to do when they’re asked to be plot devices in M. Night Shyamalan movies. Trent befriends Idlib (Kailen Jude), nephew of the resort manager and also a plot device, because he and Trent engage in an activity that surely will not have any significance in the third act, right? Right.

Priscia works as a museum curator and Guy is an actuary, and as a result, they speak in the manner of museum curators and actuaries instead of actual human beings. “You always think about the past. You work in a goddamn museum!” Guy says during one of their arguments, which is the precise moment in which we learn that Priscia works in a goddamn museum. She also has a benign tumor in her abdomen that the kids don’t know about, and hey, guess what, if you suspect that the tumor is also a plot device, you may be on to something.

The resort manager sets up a nice day trip to a private beach for the Cappas, something he reserves for only a chosen few. What a thoughtful fella! They’re joined by a few more chosen ones: An arrogant surgeon, Charles (Rupert Sewell); his image-obsessed string-bikini’d wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee); their six-year-old daughter Kara (Kylie Begley); and Charles’ mother, Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant), and her little dog too. Hanging out on the beach when they get there is a famous rapper known as Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). A nurse named Jarin (Ken Leung) and his psychologist wife Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) join later, and yes, the nurse is more than willing to help if anyone gets hurt and the psychologist always wants to talk things out, and if either of them, say, is a golf enthusiast or amateur mystery novelist or Precious Moments collector, we’ll never know, because those things just aren’t plot-devicey enough.

These are the sub-unidimensional characters who will submit to the will of Shyamalan’s plot, which starts picking up speed when a woman’s dead body joins their picnic. This is when everyone learns that cell phone reception is nil, and any attempt to make their way up the path away from the beach causes them to feel ill and black out. Even weirder things start to happen: The adults look away for a bit and turn around to realize the kids have all aged five years — Trent is now played by Luca Faustino Rodriguez, Maddox by Thomasin McKenzie and Kara by Mikaya Fisher (paving the way for roles by Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen). The adults are aging too but it’s less noticeable because they’re adults, see. And then everyone gets old really fast and dies. The end!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: We mostly agree that The Happening was infuriatingly dumb, right? Well, Old reminds me of The Happening.

Performance Worth Watching: I dunno. This seems like the appropriate place to mention that Shyamalan manages to make his cast look and sound silly by asking them to recite his atrocious dialogue. Shed a tear for the usually wonderful Krieps and McKenzie, especially.

Memorable Dialogue: Patricia reviews the movie for all of us who are mortally annoyed by this movie: “I don’t like this dynamic at all!”

Sex and Skin: The hindquarters of a skinny-dipping woman.

Our Take: First, I want to fire Shyamalan’s dialogue into the sun, then push the sun into a black hole just to be sure. If you’re writing words that talented, versatile actors like Bernal, Krieps and McKenzie can’t salvage, then that’s a problem. One might argue that Shyamalan purposely stylizes his films to be tonally distinctive, and one either accepts it as the way his fictional realities function or one doesn’t. But that also sounds like one’s making excuses for him, and after enduring all this stumblebum cadaver-stiff dialogue and infuriatingly transparent plotting, one may not be in the f—ing mood to make excuses.

So let’s spitball what the twist could be, shall we?

• Secret ancient time warp
• The characters drank the water and it made them all crazy
• It Was All A Dream
• Bermuda Triangle
• Aliens
• Superintelligent dolphins hypnotizing people and making them experience things that aren’t really happening
• Superintelligent alien dolphins hypnotizing people and making them experience things that aren’t really happening
• M. Night Shyamalan plays himself and reveals at the end that he’s been making a ridiculous movie just to eff with us the whole time

Obviously, the truth I shan’t reveal, but I will say it sacrifices predictability for fatuousness. Maybe you’ll sniff out a bit of it, but Shyamalan is so fully committed to contriving a pseudo-thoughtful quasi-philosophical stunningly banal thought experiment, your logic isn’t likely to line up with his. Such as it is — this plot is like single-ply tissue paper stretched over a bottomless void: Have fun poking holes in it and peering into the stupefying abyss, but be careful not to fall in.

Admittedly, Shyamalan’s storytelling voice is singular, but please note, that compliment is backhanded. Old is a weird combination of overwrought melodrama (as if we’re supposed to be taking this seriously), unconvincing bickering (where the dialogue is at its most insipid), stunning cinematography (via Mike Gioulakis, who puts his eerie pans and pivots to good use here), laughably grisly gore (it’s like a slasher movie with an invisible, existential slasher) and an effectively tender moment or two (that’s Krieps and Bernal at work), and all of it rolls into a series of reveals in the explainypants eyeroller of a climax. It’s very much in Shyamalan’s tonal and stylistic wheelhouse, and you’re either on board or kicking it to the curb — and my toes hurt.

Our Call: SKIP IT. I checked out of Old early, but kept on slogging for professional purposes; remember, you don’t carry such a burden.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.