Rating of
3/4
Time Isn't On Your Side
Chris Kavan - wrote on 08/04/21
Luckily for all of us, M. Night Shyamalan has left the era of blockbusters behind to focus on what he does best - slow-building horror and, yes, with a twist at the end. After the one-two misfires of Last Airbender and After Earth, the director went back to his roots with The Visit and followed it up with Split (one of my personal favorites) and the disappointing followup Glass. Now we have Old, in which a group of people on a tropical getaway find themselves on a secluded beach, a beach they find they cannot leave, as they suffer from an accelerated time that has years passing in a matter of hours. But, as Shyamalan himself has said, the movie is really about family - and how to deal with growing up and, yes, growing old.
Our main family unit is Guy (Gael García Bernal), wife Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and two children Trent (
Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton). After a super enthusiastic welcome from the resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) the family is blown away by all the resort has to offer and Trent quickly makes friends with Idlib (Kailen Jude), the manager's son as they bond over secret codes and other things. This also gives us a chance to introduce us to the rest of our future group - Charles (Rufus Sewell), a doctor, his wife, Chrystal (Abby Lee), who suffers from a calcium deficiency and their daughter, Kara along with Jarin (Ken Leung) and his wife, Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) who suffers from epilepsy.
After the manager mentions a prefect secluded spot to spend the day, our family of four agrees and finds themselves on the beach where there is a lone man who Maddox quickly identifies as rapper supreme Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre - also, perhaps the greatest fake rap name of all time). He seems to be just sitting alone - and, as everyone settles in, things seem okay - but Charles has brought along his aged mother (athleen Chalfant) and as the kids play in the water, discover the body of a young woman who our quiet rapper identifies as a friend he brought along and Charles is too quick to assign blame to the black rapper.
Things escalate quickly from here - people black out when they try to leave via the cave they arrived in - Charles' mother dies, the body decays as a rapid pace and the kids aren't kids anymore - as Trent (now played by Alex Wolff), Maddox (Thomasin McKenzie) and Kara (Eliza Scanlen) have all grown into teens in a few hours. While the adults are perplexed and afraid and try to chalk this up to some kind of virus - it soon becomes apparent they are all aging at a rapid pace. Soon we discover our group has several problems - Prisca is dealing with a tumor, Mid-Sized Sedan has blood clotting problems, Charles is suffering from some mental deterioration and Chrystal has that calcium thing going. And, in both a tragic/hilarious turn of events, Kara gets pregnant and it turns out newborns aren't good at handling rapid aging.
The rest of the film focuses on various attempts at escape and the fact that some mysterious figure seems to be watching them from afar. There are also plenty of deaths - some more gruesome than others - and clues about what is really going on that leads to our twist end. While Old doesn't have the impact of Shyamalan's best, it is far better than his middling years with The Happening and Lady in the Water. The film can play things to more ridiculous levels at times - and some things that are supposed to be frightening may elicit more of a chuckle - but the core of the film is that none of us can escape growing old - or death for that matter - and it all comes down to how we deal with it.
