Shyamalan\u2019s latest, Old<\/em>, is full of these kinds of choices, and they aren\u2019t limited to the filmmaking. In addition to the deliberate decisions being made behind the camera, the ability to make a choice quickly and live with the consequences is one of the themes of the film. But as big as this movie goes, you\u2019d be hard-pressed to call most of the choices Shyamalan makes here good ones. For every thought-provoking idea presented, there\u2019s a creative execution behind it that leaves you asking \u201cWhy?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Guy (Gael Garc\u00eda Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are a couple with two young kids, 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and six-year-old Trent (Nolan River), headed to a vacation at a fancy tropical resort. The family and a group of fellow travelers head to a secluded beach for the day, but the trip turns terrifying when Trent discovers a woman\u2019s dead body and a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre, and no, I\u2019m not making up his character\u2019s name) who claims he has no idea what happened to her.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The corpse becomes the least of everyone\u2019s worries when the kids, and everyone else, start aging at an alarming rate. Maddox, Trent and their new playmate Kara go from children to teenagers, played by Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen respectively, in minutes. Wealthy surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell) displays advancing mental problems. His wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) experiences some wicked osteoporosis. Meanwhile, Guy, Prisca and the rest of the group try to determine a way off the beach and back to safety, with varying degrees of success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Shyamalan pulls off a few neat tricks, including some snazzy camera angles and, yes, a patented third-act twist that puts some things into a clever new perspective. But all of his usual problems are here, too, including his bizarre penchant for unnaturally wooden dialogue, which here is The Happening<\/em>-levels of awkward. His stacked cast does a better-than-average job of selling those lines, particularly Sewell, who\u2019s so natural it\u2019s like he\u2019s wandered in from a totally different (better) film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The other issue is a much stranger one. It\u2019s not really a spoiler to say that the conceit of Old<\/em> is rife with possibility for body horror, and there are several moments where the film gets conceptually gnarly. Yet in every Cronenbergian situation, Shyamalan always cuts away, or shoots the scene so we never see what\u2019s happening, only the reactions to it. The result feels off-kilter and weirdly (not to mention needlessly) protective of the audience. You could make an argument for this decision, but there\u2019s a much better case for not incorporating these moments, which include a nasty fall and an emergency surgery, at all, if Shyamalan is truly that averse to showing them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Old<\/em> pulls itself out of a nosedive in its final act, which is so wackadoo that it makes you wonder if there\u2019s a level of self-awareness to everything before it that requires reassessment. Determining whether that twist makes the movie secretly actually good or an unintentional campfest presents a head-spinning conundrum that takes up a lot of time. If Shyamalan\u2019s film teaches us anything, it\u2019s that time is something none of us have enough of, so if you\u2019re not in the mood for that debate, yours is probably better spent elsewhere. “Old” is in theaters Friday. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/old2-1024x534.png\")
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