Review of Old, directed by M. Night Shyamalan

For those of you who have never set foot virtually into this space, welcome! This is my blog, which serves as an online diary and digital archive of everything I’ve watched, read, and experienced in the past few years. Recently, it has become a source of income for me, and a crux as I faced unexpected unemployment after an opportunity I was told I had fell through. Feel free to click around if you liked this post.

In addition to this become a vital income source while I’m unemployed, I’ve been actually catching up on my content game. There are so many movies, television shows, and books I’ve watched and read throughout the years but never had the chance to review, so while I’ve had the free time, I’m dedicating more time to catching up on these reviews.

This review of Old is one of those reviews I’ve ben marinating in for a while. I half-wrote the review a hot minute ago when I watched it. How long as has it been? Well, I watched Old when I had an HBO Max subscription, and I haven’t had an HBO Max subscription in a hot minute because it was kind of pricy. Plus I quit my job as a film critic, so I kind of didn’t need it anymore.

That said, I’m doing this thing on the blog lately where I revisit these reviews, spruce them up, and go back to the movies I watched a while ago. It’s kind of a fun way to map out how my tastes have changed throughout the years.

Let’s get into the review. I don’t want to ramble too much in the introduction, as I know the semantics and too much context can bore you.

When a group of tourists end up at a beach, they find themselves rapidly aging and unable to escape.

This movie begins its focus on one family, the Cappas, going away on a family vacation. This isn’t a normal one though: this is going to be their final one as a family, as the parents, Guy and Prisca, have decided to separate. They have two young kids, Maddox and Trent, and when they arrive at the resort, the kids notice how their parents are arguing at night.

They play with the nephew of the place’s manager instead, missing the fact that their mother has an ovarian tumor while they play. Morning arrives, and the manager decides to invite the family to a beach with a few other individuals. They all head to the beach, which seems pretty nice, until Trent discovers the body of rapper Brendan’s female friend.

We then learn that Brendan is having nosebleeds due to his hemophilia, and then the elderly woman, Agnes, dies randomly. The children also become teenagers, and the families come together and realize that the beach they are on is somehow aging them.

Every thirty minutes, they are aging another year. Each family also has someone with a medical condition, and when they try to leave the beach, they fall unconscious and end up where they started. One of the men, Charles, takes his pocketknife and goes after Brendan, who heals immediately.

Prisca’s tumor then begins rapidly growing as well, and Charles conducts surgery to remove it. Trent and Kara, who are similarly aged, are teenagers and have sex with each other. Kara then gets pregnant, but the baby starves to death when she gives birth due to the rapid time acceleration.

Charles then kills Brendan due to his schizophrenia going unchecked and worse. Jarin ends up drowning, while Kara goes climbing and then falls to her death. Patricia has a seizure, which kills her, and Guy and Prisca are becoming elderly.

While roaming the beach, Maddox and Trent find a notebook of someone who was trapped on the beach, and they learn they are being watched. Charles attacks their parents that night, and Prisca ends up killing him with a rusted knife and an infection it causes. Chrystal also dies due to her bones rupturing, and Guy and Prisca pass away due to old age.

Maddox and Trent are middle aged by the time morning breaks, but still they’re mentally kids. They make a sandcastle and discover that their friend, the kid of the manager, told them how to get off the beach. They follow an underwater passage, and the employee monitoring them believes everyone has died and calls off the trial.

Turns out this is a trial from a pharmaceutical company looking to try out some new medical drugs. They look for guests with underlying conditions and then spike their drinks with it, and the beach, which does accelerate aging, is a place to see whether the drugs work within a day.

As a new group is brought to the beach, Maddox and Trent reveal themselves, using the notebooks as evidence of what happened here. A police officer vacationing there realizes everyone on the list is a missing person, and everyone involved is arrested. Tent and Maddox, still middle-aged, are going to live with their aunt.

Overall Thoughts

This is such a wild film when it comes to plot, and I could lowkey see this happening in real life—minus the aging beach, that seems to be the fantasy element. But if you’re looking for a movie with more substance, this probably will not be for you.

I found the premise of the film to be compelling, but the way it actually unfolds is quite anticlimactic for me. I see what the director/writer were going for here, but it wasn’t the kind of film I personally find entertaining. The dialogue was also a bit clunky, and we don’t really come to care for the characters.

I see this movie had a lot of potential, but the way it is just isn’t for me in the end. Someone else might disagree though, and that’s alright. Taste is subjective.

If you’re interested, don’t let one bad review influence you. Go ahead and watch it! I personally will not be returning to it though.

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