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‘the room next door’ review: tilda swinton and julianne moore save pedro almodóvar’s uneven english-language feature debut.

A woman with terminal cancer asks a complicated favor of an old friend in this adaptation of a Sigrid Nunez novel, also featuring John Turturro and Alessandro Nivola.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Tilda swinton, julianne moore dazzle in venice as pedro almodóvar's 'the room next door' earns 17-minute standing ovation, armani hosts star-studded soiree at venice film festival with richard gere, cate blanchett, the room next door.

In The Room Next Door , melodrama and theatricality are tamped down, resulting in a very measured drama about life, death and the responsibilities of friendship that at times risks becoming an arid intellectual exercise. Without two such accomplished lead actors, it’s doubtful this would work at all.

What does work right from the start is the director’s customary attention to visual detail, to the ways that spatial lines, symmetry and especially color can give shape to his characters’ inner lives. Only in an Almodóvar movie might you find a hospital patient dressed in dazzling shades of firetruck red and azure and magenta. (Bina Daigeler did the eye-catching costumes.)

Production designer Inbal Weinberg makes every meticulously dressed interior a distinctive frame in which to observe the two women protagonists. But it’s when the story leaves Manhattan and heads to a luxury modernist rental near Woodstock that it starts acquiring emotional vitality.

Tucked away in a woodsy setting, that house is an architectural delight, a cluster of what look like cubic boxes in wood and glass almost inviting us to arrange and unpack them, while freeing up the movie to do the same with its characters.

Moore plays successful writer Ingrid, signing books at a Rizzoli author event when she learns that her friend Martha (Swinton) has been hospitalized with cancer. The two women worked together decades ago at Paper magazine but have fallen out of touch in more recent times, partly because Martha’s work as a New York Times war correspondent kept her on the move.

The awkwardness of semi-estrangement melts away instantly when Ingrid visits the hospital and Martha explains that she’s agreed to be a guinea pig in an experimental treatment for her Stage 3 cervical cancer.

Unfortunately, she then launches into a lengthy background recap that feels almost as if Swinton is reading book excerpts off cue cards. Also, much of the information Martha shares would surely be familiar to Ingrid because it predates their time as magazine colleagues. It’s in this opening stretch in particular that you might wish Almodóvar had worked with a co-writer able to loosen up the English dialogue and make it more fluid.

The same goes for Ingrid’s discussion, when they meet up again outside the hospital, of her next book project, a semi-fictionalized account of the unconventional love story between Bloomsbury Group figures Dora Carrington and Lytton Strachey, who was gay. Martha responds by recalling her one, unpublished foray into fiction with a different queer romance, inspired by two Spanish Carmelite missionaries she met in Baghdad.

Digressions into other people’s stories are a part of Nunez’s book, but here they just seem to be stalling for time before Martha makes the request of Ingrid that we can clearly see coming.

She explains that the treatments have failed and the cancer has spread, admitting that war was as much an adrenaline rush as a horror but she’s no stoic when it comes to pain: “I think I deserve a good death.” Martha has gotten hold of an illegal euthanasia pill and says she’s been ready to go since her first diagnosis. But she wants a friend to be in the next room when she takes it, flinching at the thought of a stranger finding her body. And she wants to do it in a place where she has no history.

While Martha has planned carefully to ensure that Ingrid won’t be implicated, Swinton, who has made herself look gaunt and hollow-eyed for the role, is unafraid to make the character appear selfish and insensitive to the emotional burden she has placed on her friend. Even so, there’s relatively little conflict in their time together.

Given Martha’s decisiveness, there’s no will-she-or-won’t-she tension, though that’s not something that interests Almodóvar. Nor is any morality debate around the right-to-die issue — even if the director is clearly in favor of legal euthanasia access. But there’s a cumulative satisfaction in watching two infinitely compelling actresses play women negotiating questions large and small. And there’s a sad beauty in the finality of Martha’s decision.

Swinton and Moore imbue the movie with heart that at first seems elusive, along with the dignity, humanity and empathy that are as much Almodóvar’s subjects here as mortality. What ultimately makes the movie affecting is its appreciation for the consolation of companionship during the most isolating time of life.

The movie feels sometimes subdued to a fault and could have used a few more notes of gallows humor to vary the tone, but it benefits enormously in terms of emotionality from the luxuriant carpeting of Alberto Iglesias’ score. Grau’s sedate camerawork has a contrasting calming effect, suggesting peace for Martha and sorrowful acceptance for Ingrid. The production appears to have shot mostly in Spain with just second unit work in Manhattan, but it captures an idea of New York, if not much sense of place.

One of the most satisfying touches, injecting resonant feeling into the final moments, is a passage lifted from James Joyce’s novel and John Huston’s film of The Dead , providing a poetic coda.

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• Pedro Almodóvar’s <i>The Room Next Door</i> Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

Pedro Almodóvar’s The Room Next Door Finds Joy Even as It Stares Down Death 

F or those who have been following his career from the start , the idea of Pedro Almodóvar’s growing older—and increasingly using his films to reflect on illness and death, or at least just the inevitable slowdown that comes for most of us—is a bitter pill. None of us relishes thinking about our own mortality. But sometimes it feels worse to think about losing an artist we love, especially one as vital and ageless as Almodóvar. One of his finest, most moving works , 2019’s Pain and Glory , reckoned with the nuisances of aging, as well as the trauma of being an artist in crisis. But the director’s first English-language movie, The Room Next Door —playing in competition here at the Venice Film Festival —delves even further into the murky waters of our feelings about death. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as Ingrid and Martha, old friends who bonded in New York in the 1980s but who have been out of touch for a long time. They reconnect when Ingrid learns that Martha is being treated for cancer, and their rekindled friendship veers into complicated territory.

The Room Next Door is an adaptation, written by Almodóvar himself, of Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, and at first the movie’s tone feels a little strange, untethered to any easily identifiable genre. It’s a story about friendship, clearly, but also about a woman facing a solitary and difficult choice. The dialogue sometimes feels flat and wooden. At one point Martha reminds Ingrid of the lover they’d once shared, though technically, he’d drifted toward Ingrid after he and Martha had broken up. “He was a passionate and enthusiastic lover, and I hope he was for you too,” Martha says, and though she means it, the line hits with a thud. And even if Almodóvar goes for a laugh here or there, overall the tone of The Room Next Door is a bit somber—almost like a black comedy, but not quite.

Read more: The Best New Movies of August 2024

And yet, by the end, something almost mystical has happened: the movie’s final moments usher in a kind of twilight, a state of grace that you don't see coming. Ingrid, a successful writer, first hears of Martha’s illness at a signing event for her most recent book. Though she hasn’t seen Martha in years, she dutifully visits her at the hospital where she’s being treated. They catch up quickly: Martha, who worked for years as a war correspondent, has a daughter, Michelle, born when she was still a teenager. Michelle has accused Martha of being a bad mother, and is particularly resentful that she has withheld information about Michelle’s father. Martha denies none of it. Still, she wishes she and Michelle were closer, and her grave illness—she has stage three cervical cancer—puts a new spin on things. She’s hoping the experimental treatment she’s been receiving will work; she’s devastated when she learns that it isn’t.

And so she procures for herself— on the Dark Web , she tells Ingrid, almost in a whisper—an illegal pill that will put an end to all of it. She has worked out all the details: she’ll leave a note for the police, explaining that she alone is responsible for her fate. And she doesn’t want a stranger discovering her body. When she decides the time is right, what she wants, she says, is to know that a friend is in “the room next door.” She has decided Ingrid will be that friend, though Ingrid, who has a quivering, electric, nervous quality beneath her veneer of self-confidence, at first wants no part of it.

Ingrid has re-entered Martha’s life in a whirlwind of good intentions. But does she really want to help Martha die ? She’s not so sure. (She has also, unbeknownst to Martha, reconnected platonically with that old shared boyfriend; his name is Damian, and he’s played, with a kind of droll swagger, by John Turturro .) Ingrid and Martha’s rekindled friendship seems shaky at first. Martha has decided that she doesn’t want to die in her own smartly appointed Fifth Avenue apartment. So she books a tony modern country house somewhere near Woodstock—it has amazing views of nature that only money can buy—and she and Ingrid pack their bags and drive up. Almost as soon as they arrive, Martha panics. She’s forgotten the precious euthanasia pill; she insists that she and Ingrid drive back to Manhattan immediately to get it. Ingrid barely hides her annoyance; how did she get into this situation, anyway? Briefly, the movie tap-dances into screwball-comedy territory. It would all be very funny, if Martha weren’t suffering so much.

But The Room Next Door is on its way to place of tenderness and accord—we just can’t see it yet. At one point, Martha rages against her illness, but also against the cheap bromides people use when they talk about cancer, often referring to treating it as a “battle,” a test of strength that’s also somehow a measure of virtue. “If you lose, well, maybe you just didn’t fight hard enough,” she says bitterly. No wonder she wants to write the ending to her own story: “I think I deserve a good death."

Swinton’s Martha is frail but still, somehow, has the vitality of a pale blond moon; Moore , with her burgundy-red hair and intense, searching eyes, brings a rush of color into her life. They talk about books, art, movies: Martha has been thinking about the closing lines of James Joyce’s The Dead, so they spend an evening watching John Huston’s gorgeous 1987 version on the rental's DVD player. They make conversation about little things: a recent book that interests them both, Roger Lewis’ Erotic Vagrancy, about the partnership of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton ; the reproduction of Edward Hopper’s People in the Sun that hangs in the rented house’s hallway. Their idle conversations are a kind of casual nourishment.

It's a pleasure to watch these two actors together. Martha and Ingrid riff against and annoy each another until suddenly, they find their groove, and the movie does too. Shot by Eduard Grau, the film has a rich, handsome look, and the production and costume design are characteristically Almodóvarian in their jubilance. The sets include stunningly orchestrated combinations of pickle green and tomato red; there are artfully shabby velvet couches and walls casually sponged with cobalt-blue paint. (The production designer is Inbal Weinberg; the costumes are by Bina Daigeler.) It’s all marvelous to look at, but this kind of visual splendor might evoke some guilt, too. Is it wrong to be ogling Martha’s fabulous, mega-chunky color-blocked knit pullover when you know, as she does, that death is just one little pill away?

But as the story wheels forward, it becomes clear that the joy Almodóvar takes in colors and patterns isn’t beside the point; it is the point. He’s created a kind of cocoon world for these two women, as they embark together on a bumpy adventure. And that’s how he beckons us into their story. Lime and lilac, scarlet and saffron: he knows what colors work together, which combinations will surprise us or offer a jolt of delight. The colors of The Room Next Door are its secret message, a language of pleasure and beauty that reminds us how great it is to be alive. If it’s possible to make a joyful movie about death, Almodóvar has just done it.

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Running on empty.

• Common Sense Says
• Parents Say 0 Reviews
• Kids Say 0 Reviews

Common Sense Media Review

Dark, mature romcom asks big questions, comes up empty.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Running on Empty is a dark romantic comedy about a mortician named Mort (Keir Gilchrist) who learns he has less than a year to live. It has mature sexual situations, plus graphic sex-related dialogue, kissing, flirting, and revealing outfits. Language is also strong, with use of…

Why Age 15+?

Very brief image of a woman thrusting behind a man (nothing explicit shown, but

Several uses of "f--k," plus "motherf----r," "s--t," "bulls--t," "t-ts," "a--hol

A man forces a woman up against the wall and grabs her throat. Characters fight,

Wine with dinner; one character keeps pouring more wine, despite her partner app

Mention of Trader Joe's.

Any Positive Content?

Addresses death, arguing that death doesn't really matter and shouldn't be scary

Mort is sort of a "lost" character who's searching for happiness. But he never d

Largely focused on a White man; the women in his life are mainly there to suppor

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Very brief image of a woman thrusting behind a man (nothing explicit shown, but it's a visual reference to an earlier verbal mention of "pegging," i.e., a woman wearing a sex toy and penetrating a man). Kissing. A character meets a sex worker in a bar; she lets him feel her breasts through her dress and invites him back to her place, changes into lingerie, suggests oral sex, straddles him, and gives him a lap dance, which is interrupted. After a date, one character invites another home; they kiss, she pulls him inside, and the scene cuts to her lying in bed and him getting dressed (sex is implied). A woman in a bikini slowly climbs out of a swimming pool. Man shown shirtless. Frequent graphic sex-related dialogue. Sexual gesture.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Several uses of "f--k," plus "motherf----r," "s--t," "bulls--t," "t-ts," "a--hole," "p---y," "bitch," "son of a bitch," "ass," "dumbass," "balls," "butt," "crap," "Jesus Christ" and "oh God" (as exclamations), "pissed," "scumbag," "whore," "vagina," "blow job," and "hummer."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Violence & Scariness

A man forces a woman up against the wall and grabs her throat. Characters fight, with kicks in the groin, punching, and someone getting hit in the face with a bicycle. A person falls to their death; crumpled body shown. A character is struck by a car; bloody wounds, seeping blood puddle. Deaths. Character thrown on ground. Guns are shown/brandished. Physical threat. Reference to someone being killed by a drunk driver. Reference to necrophilia.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Wine with dinner; one character keeps pouring more wine, despite her partner appearing upset with her. Social drinking (shots, beer, wine). Vaping and cigarette smoking. Reference to someone being killed by a drunk driver.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Products & Purchases

Positive messages.

Addresses death, arguing that death doesn't really matter and shouldn't be scary. These assertions come through in dialogue; characters never really seem to think very hard about them. The existence of a service in which characters can find out their death day raises the thoughtful question: Would you do the same?

Positive Role Models

Mort is sort of a "lost" character who's searching for happiness. But he never does much that's admirable, and supporting characters are pretty thinly drawn.

Diverse Representations

Largely focused on a White man; the women in his life are mainly there to support him or give him some kind of experience. Most other characters are White as well. In supporting cast, Black actor Jay Pharoah plays a driver working at the funeral home who appears in a few scenes, and Black actors (Isaac C. Singleton Jr. and Lisa Yaro) play a pimp and a sex worker. During a dating montage, Michelle Farrah Huang appears as an unsympathetic woman of unspecified Asian descent. Writer-director Daniel Andre was born in Mexico.

Did we miss something on diversity? Suggest an update.

Parents need to know that Running on Empty is a dark romantic comedy about a mortician named Mort ( Keir Gilchrist ) who learns he has less than a year to live. It has mature sexual situations, plus graphic sex-related dialogue, kissing, flirting, and revealing outfits. Language is also strong, with use of words including "f--k," "motherf----r," "s--t," "t-ts," "a--hole," "p---y," "bitch," "oh God," and "ass." Characters die, and there are bloody wounds and seeping blood, as well as gun threat, physical threat (a man forces a woman up against a wall and grabs her throat), a mangled corpse, fighting, kicking, a character getting hit by a car, a fatal fall, and more. There's social drinking (shots, beers, wine, etc.), and one character appears to be drinking too much wine with dinner. There's also occasional vaping and smoking and a reference to a fatal drunk driving accident. Lucy Hale co-stars. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

Videos and photos.

Parent and Kid Reviews

• Parents say

There aren't any parent reviews yet. Be the first to review this title.

What's the Story?

In RUNNING ON EMPTY, Mortimer "Mort" Mortensen ( Keir Gilchrist ) works in a funeral home with his Uncle Barry ( Jim Gaffigan ) and is forever clad in a neat black suit. Along with his fianc ée, Nicole ( Francesca Eastwood ), Mort gets a Life Day Count test and discovers that he has less than a year left to live. Nicole leaves him, and he begins a series of misadventures. Mort meets a woman in a bar, which leads to an unsavory run-in with an angry pimp, Simon (Rhys Coiro), who demands increasing amounts of money for a perceived wrong. And a dating service leads to strange encounters with various women, one of whom even steals Mort's jacket and wallet. But when Kate ( Lucy Hale ), who works shooting videos for the dating service, befriends him, things start to look up again ... at least for a while.

Is It Any Good?

Presumably starting off as a dark comedy before morphing into a rather routine—and unfunny—romcom, this odd, bland movie seems to have been built from bits of other movies with minimal effort. Running on Empty focuses on a character whose name literally means "death" and is set partially in a funeral home where the corpses are posed doing lifelike things; it seems to want to follow in a kind of Harold and Maude mode, but its disaffected tone makes everything seem pointless. And when it suddenly jettisons this attempt at dark comedy and Mort tries to learn how to live, it becomes just ... regular. The characters seem like cutouts, including the kind of goofy supporters (Gaffigan mostly makes crude sex references) and free-wheeling outsider girl (Hale) we've seen hundreds of times before. (SNL's Jay Pharoah , who plays the funeral home's driver and appears in a just couple of scenes, gets the movie's only real laughs, especially in a scene where he helps suspend a lady's corpse into a hang-gliding pose.)

The movie also resorts to several uninspired montages to shove its story along. Its biggest problem, however, is probably Mort himself. Forever clad in his suit and with his pouty, innocent expression that rarely changes, he doesn't seem real or relatable. The title is a further suggestion of the movie's general sense of lethargy. Running on Empty is also the name of a classic Sidney Lumet movie , and it means nothing here, other than to hint that the movie, indeed, has run out of gas.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about Running on Empty 's violence . How did it make you feel? Was it exciting? Shocking? Were you expecting that kind of content in a romantic comedy?

How is sex depicted? Is casual sex glamorized? Parents, talk to your teens about your own values regarding sex and relationships.

Does Simon bully others? How is bullying handled in this story? Are there other approaches?

If you could, would you choose to find out your death date? Why, or why not?

Movie Details

• In theaters : August 9, 2024
• Cast : Keir Gilchrist , Lucy Hale , Francesca Eastwood
• Director : Daniel Andre
• Inclusion Information : Latino directors, Mexican directors, Female actors
• Studio : Lionsgate
• Genre : Comedy
• Run time : 91 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language and sexual content
• Last updated : August 8, 2024

Did we miss something on diversity?

Research shows a connection between kids' healthy self-esteem and positive portrayals in media. That's why we've added a new "Diverse Representations" section to our reviews that will be rolling out on an ongoing basis. You can help us help kids by suggesting a diversity update.

Suggest an Update

What to watch next.

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(500) Days of Summer

Garden State

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Forgetting Sarah Marshall

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Romantic comedies, goofy comedy movies to watch with tweens and teens.

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• What Is Cinema?

George Clooney and Brad Pitt Work Better Together in Wolfs

It’s been 23 years since George Clooney and Brad Pitt first teamed up to do a caper, forming one of the more indelible movie pairings of the new century. They made three Ocean’s movies together, briefly shared the screen in Burn After Reading , and then went their separate ways.

But they couldn’t stay apart forever. Thus Wolfs , a new crime comedy that premiered here at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday. Written and directed by Jon Watts —who made the last three Spider-Man movies and, more relevantly, the clever low-budget thriller Cop Car —the film is an amiable lark, more of a saunter than a dash through wintry, nighttime New York City. As a pair of rival underworld fixers , Clooney and Pitt invert their Ocean’s dynamic. They’re strangers to one another, and initially hostile in the ring-a-ding banter way of comedies like this; we never think they’re going to start shooting at each other.

They meet in a luxe hotel suite after both being called for the same job: a panicking woman ( Amy Ryan ) is standing over the body of a nearly nude young man lying on the bedroom floor. She needs it cleaned up and to make a discreet exit. It’s an amusing, lively scene that sets the stage for a movie in which people can be hurt, but nothing is going to get too dark. Which is the right tone for a Clooney/Pitt team up; they’ve always worked best when they’re not all that serious.

Both men, unnamed throughout the film, want to be the guy in charge, a bit that gets a little stale in all its repetition but is still sold by leading-man glow. Anyway, they’re soon bonded together in a manner familiar in Hollywood plotting: a pesky youngster who has suddenly come under their care. He’s the presumed dead guy on the floor, a seeming innocent who has found himself caught up in a city-wide drug war. He explains this mostly in a spluttering, rapid-fire monologue delivered with verve by Austin Abrams , who ably holds his own against two of the biggest movie stars on the planet. The kid’s presence nicely complicates the two fixers’ rapport, and creates a surprising, morbid suspense: to make the getaway entirely clean, the kid might have to go.

But first the threesome has to go on a little quest, a minor odyssey through various corners of the city. Which, it must be said, is something of the fourth main character in the film. Watts is a local, and he films his town with affection and fresh perspective. He’s found lots of interesting locations—an outer-borough banquet hall, the forlorn Brighton Beach boardwalk, neon-lit Chinatown—and shot them lushly. A soft and steady snow falls throughout the film, adding a sense of peace and hush to offset the garrulous antics. A testament to the specific graces of on-location filming, Wolfs presents a New York that is at once recognizable and novel.

The script could use a bit more of that idiosyncrasy. While there are plenty of amusing quips and running gags, some of Pitt and Clooney’s repartee feels like recycled material from the Ocean -verse, a kind of repetitious back-and-forth that mistakes tempo for wit. There are also a few narrative contrivances that glare in an otherwise sleek, smart production—one in particular involving the aforementioned banquet hall and a Croatian wedding dance. Maybe Watts is lovingly referring back to the broad comedies of his youth, but Wolfs is otherwise too cool for such cliché.

For the most part, though, Wolfs meets the brief. It’s a confident, engaging Saturday-night movie, of the sort that has become dismayingly rare. How heartening to see a director return from the realm of superheroes (where he was responsible for some of the better entries) and make a humbler, more streamlined film for grownups. All he had to do was get two global superstars to get the project across the financing finish line.

It’s a shame, then, that Apple backed away from the proper theatrical release originally planned for the film. Wolfs is the kind of movie that probably could get people out of their houses, a satisfying complement to dinner and drinks. The movie is not trying to make any grand statements or reinvent any wheels; it is only trying to entertain. This used to be a good enough reason to leave the couch. If Wolfs is playing at a theater near you, consider making the investment. Tell the Hollywood powers that be that you’re willing to help them fix the terrible mess they’ve made.

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The Worst Netflix Original Horror Movies, According To Rotten Tomatoes

For the horror heads among us, perusing a streamer's genre page can be a goldmine of camp opportunities or disturbing folk horror to keep us up at night, but it can also be home to some of the most tedious stories put to film. Whether it's an ill-advised continuation of a franchise or an adaptation in the wrong hands, even the mighty Netflix isn't immune to acquiring, producing, and/or distributing some stinkers. In fact, they tend to excel at it.

While Rotten Tomatoes isn't the be-all and end-all of movie criticism ( and it almost seems to be trying to discredit it more and more ), it can provide a quick temperature check to a movie's well being — a helpful measure for all of us when considering how we want to spend our time rotting away on the couch. Mileage can vary on how much to trust the aggregated rating of a bunch of critics, but for these original Netflix horror movies, there's a clear warning sign ahead: proceed with caution, because these movies kind of suck.

The Open House – 7%

Beginning with the most rotten by a country mile, Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote's "The Open House" failed to impress even a tenth of the critics that reviewed,  sitting at a pithy 7% on the Tomatometer . The film follows a mother and son forced to move to a secluded mountain following the sudden death of their husband and father. Starring Dylan Minnette and Piercey Dalton, the two encounter strange behaviors and happenstances, eventually going head to head with the film's villain, "Evil Boots."

While the premise of "The Open House" is far from being terrible, it's the execution of the film that sinks any positives. Andrew Wyatt at The Lens defiantly calls the movie, "Utterly insufferable and almost maliciously pointless." While at Den of Geek , Alec Bojalad points to the "astonishingly bad ending" as the film's most significant undoing.

Hypnotic – 24%

Another directorial collaboration between the husband and wife duo Matt Angel and Suzanne Coote, "Hypnotic" follows a cruel hypnotherapist (Jason O'Mara) who engages his client, Jenn (Kate Siegel), in a chilling game which finds her at the mercy of a madman.

There may have been a time where a film like "Hypnotic" felt fresh and exciting, but Matt Fowler at IGN Movies notes that in 2021, the movie  currently sitting with a 24%  instead feels "very out-of-time and, subsequently, very inconsequential. It dilutes what could have been a rather diabolical and memorable story and delivers a disposable ride that ends with a stilted and safe re-entry."

Taking a wider view, Nick Harley at Den of Geek sees "Hypnotic" as part of a greater problem saying, "Netflix original movies are like fast food; they're cheap and easy to make, they'll temporarily fill you up, have a passable taste that's familiar and unchallenging, but you'll either forget about the quick fix or regret it entirely."

Secret Obsession – 28%

Following a car accident, a woman (Brenda Song) finds herself in the hospital with amnesia. Unsure of who she is, how she got hurt, or anything about her life, she's told by the man at her bedside (Mike Vogel) that he is her husband and proceeds to show her pictures of their life together, seemingly filling in her memory gaps. As time wears on, she becomes increasingly wary of the stories she's been told and slowly unravels her nightmarish reality.

"Secret Obsession" gives away the farm in its title and recalls the straight-to-video movies of the '90s. While Pittsburgh Magazine's Sean Collier humorously quips, "They don't make movies like this anymore. And it's good that they don't," Eddie Strait at The Daily Dot doesn't even think "Secret Obsession" meets the standards of sub-par TV movies: "'Secret Obsession' is a soulless lump of generic mush that aspires to the cheese level of a Lifetime original joint but doesn't come anywhere close."

However, both Linda Holmes of NPR and Karen Han of Polygon take the view that while "Secret Obsession" is indeed worthy of its 28% rating , it does exactly what is says on the tin. Holmes writes, "This is a pretty bad movie, but it seems to be bad in the way it's meant to be bad." Adds Han, "'Secret Obsession' does pretty much exactly what you expect it to, and presumably what you want it to, if you watched the brief preview clip while browsing Netflix and then decided that, yes, you would like to hit play."

The Cloverfield Paradox – 22%

Since 2008, the J.J. Abrams' produced "Cloverfield" franchise has spawned a trilogy and a graphic novel to varying degrees of success. Undoubtedly, "10 Cloverfield" starring Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Goodman has seen the most success, critically and commercially; although the same cannot be said for its successor, "The Cloverfield Paradox."

Released on Netflix in 2018 and directed by Julius Onah, a considerable amount of hype was attached to the film based on the severe secrecy behind the production, aided by a since-deleted tweet from director Ava DuVernay hyping up the ending of "The Cloverfield Paradox" during the Superbowl that year . Sadly, even with a great cast, including Elizabeth Debicki, Daniel Brühl, David Oyelowo, Zhang Ziyi, and Chris O'Dowd, the third (and currently final) franchise installment fell flat.

Summarizing the movie's 22% score perfectly, Alex Hudson at Exclaim! describes the film as "too silly to live up to its potential." Recalling the pre-production madness that prompted the hype train, Cinema Sentries' Matthew St. Clair says, "Unfortunately, the hype surrounding the super secretive and constantly delayed film turned out to be more interesting than the actual film itself."

You can read our full review of "The Cloverfield Paradox" right here .

The Silence – 30%

In a world where vesps, a flying reptile type creature, hunt humans by sound, a deaf teenager and her family seek out shelter and fight for their survival, all without making any noise. No, this isn't "A Quiet Place," it's the Kiernan Shipka and Stanley Tucci led "The Silence" — a movie released a year after John Krasinski's directorial debut and based on a novel published in 2015.

Similar to the coincidental releases of "Olympus Has Fallen" and "White House Down" in 2013, "The Illusionist" and "The Prestige" in 2006, and of course, "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact" in 1998, "The Silence" and "A Quiet Place" seem to be victims of time and space — though, moreso the former than the latter. Where "A Quiet Place" was lauded for its originality and Krasinski's direction, critics were decidedly less enthused about "The Silence," resulting in a 30% rotten rating and unfavorable comparisons aplenty.

Kristy Puchko at IGN Movies succinctly states, "Imagine 'A Quiet Place,' but deeply mediocre." While Charles Bramesco at The Guardian takes aim at Netflix, "This is the most insidious type of knockoff: the one that sincerely expects you to believe that it's the real thing. Leave it to Netflix to take the fun out of incompetence."

Whether the timing was truly coincidental or Netflix attempting to capitalize off of a proven new horror trend, we can all agree that "The Silence" is aggressively forgettable .

Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022) – 30%

For as legendary as Tobe Hooper's 1974 "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre" has become, as a franchise, it feels like they've been batting at or below the Mendoza Line for the better part of its nine-movie existence. In an effort to jump start and perhaps recapture the essence of the original film, David Blue Garcia's 2022 film, "Texas Chainsaw Massacre," takes place 50 years after Hooper's, following the continuity that began in 1974, and in turn, forgoing the alternate timeline Millennium Films' had previously set up (and concluded with 2017's "Leatherface").

"Texas Chainsaw Massacre" attempted to modernize the franchise by haphazardly including references to social media, trendy buzz words, and commentary on issues prevalent to the times. Lex Briscuso at Paste Magazine describes this effort as "trite," concluding that the film rests "on topical concepts that it doesn't know how to comment on."

Contributing to the film's 30% rating , Josh Korngut for Dread Central found some positives, but ultimately concludes that "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" didn't live up to the reputation set by its original predecessor, commenting, "Even though a handful of violent scenes do breathe some life into the desecrated corpse of this legacy sequel, they in no way make up for the levels of disrespect faced by its characters and its audience."

Quite simply: "Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022)" is one of the worst films of the franchise .

Death Note – 36%

Considered to be one of the worst live-action anime adaptations , "Death Note" currently sits at 36% on the Tomatometer . The original manga series that follows a high school student who discovers a notebook that grants him the ability to kill anyone whose name is written in the pages has proven to be incredibly successful around the world, selling millions of copies and spawning numerous animated television shows. The series raised questions surrounding morality and justice, while also being highly entertaining and thrilling at the same time.

Bringing together a wealth of emerging talent at the time, such as LaKeith Stanfield and Margaret Qualley, as well as screen veterans like Willem Dafoe, Adam Wingard's adaptation and Americanization of "Death Note" just didn't land with audiences or critics. Joshua Rivera at GQ simply states, "I'm not sure who 'Death Note' is for," where Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com takes it a step further: "The ending will have you switching off your Netflix app in disgust. If you don't die from boredom before you get there."

Netflix, though, seems completely unbothered by the overwhelmingly negative reaction to "Death Note" and as of October 2022, plans are in place to give this one another go, this time via a live-action adaptation series with Halia Abdel-Meguid set to write and executive produce for "Stranger Things" creators Matt and Ross Duffer by way of their production company Upside Down.

Extinction – 31%

A sci-fi, horror, action mash-up, "Extinction" stars Michael Peña as Peter, a man terrorized by a recurring nightmare that an alien invasion destroys the world. At first understanding these dreams to be the effect of an underlying psychological issue, Peter soon begins to believe that rather than nightmares, they're premonitions of things to come.

What could have been an enticing thinkpiece on humanity and technology becomes a messy plot that clunks its way to the finish line, earning itself a 31% rating . Brad Newsome of the Sydney Morning Herald didn't find the film altogether terrible, "The big twist is a good one, there are some decent action sequences," however Newsome accepts that even with these positives, "there isn't enough here to keep things from dragging."

The general consensus of those who found the movie weak points to a movie that dreams big with little to show for it in reality. "Big Blockbuster aspirations but without much charisma or soul," writes Meagan Navarro at Bloody Disgusting . While Nick Allen at RogerEbert.com calls the movie, "A B-movie with a blockbuster attitude, and not in a fun way."

Old People – 33%

Of all the films on this list, the 2022 film "Old People" directed by Andy Fetscher intrigued me the most. Given society's penchant for discarding our elderly when we've decided they are more burdensome than valuable members, the idea of "Pensioners Fighting Back" feels ripe for either campy entertainment or thoughtful commentary on our derisive impatience as a collective. To my dismay, "Old People" more than deserves its 33% standing .

"The genre isn't known for its profundity, but Fetscher could have leaned into that more and given this movie the chance to become that horror rarity, a genuinely disturbing thriller," comments Roger Moore at Movie Nation . In place of being a properly horrifying picture, "Old People" settles for being a tedious watch where, as John Sooja at Common Sense Media notes, "the worst offense is the writing that has characters often doing stupid things or making dumb decisions, which completely dissolves any suspension of disbelief."

In the Tall Grass – 36%

One of the most prolific authors of our time, Stephen King has had his fair share of work adapted to the big screen and of course, he has his favorites . It's a safe assumption, though, "In the Tall Grass" isn't one of them.

With only 36% on Rotten Tomatoes , "In the Tall Grass" suffers from a common problem among films but a comical one when adapting King's work, even a novella: not enough source material to stretch across an acceptable feature film runtime. King is not a man of brevity and his novellas would be considered regular novels for most writers, but somehow Vincenzo Natali, who wrote and directed the film, struggled to fill a rather taut 90-minute runtime without fumbling.

At Cinema Axis , Courtney Small says, "Deep in the dense grass that surrounds the plot of Vincenzo Natali's 'In the Tall Grass' is a spectacular horror film. Unfortunately, one gets lost trying to find it." More to the point, Brian Lowry at CNN  states, "Despite an uneven track record, 'In the Tall Grass' gives the lamest King adaptations a run for their money, as writer-director Vincenzo Natali labors to stretch out the story, which takes a wrong turn in more ways than one."

Things Heard & Seen – 38%

There's nothing sadder in film than to see a tremendous performer debase themselves with lesser than material. Such is the case in the 2021 film "Things Heard & Seen" written and directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, starring Academy Award nominee Amanda Seyfried.

The film takes us back to 1980 where Catherine (Seyfried), an art restorer living in Manhattan, moves to a spooky farmhouse in upstate New York for a career opportunity for her husband. As Catherine, her husband, and their daughter settle in, Catherine and her daughter begin witnessing and feeling a spirit in their new home. "Things Heard & Seen" is a classic ghost story in every sense, including being based on real-life events , but it's one that flies every which way, never landing any of its attempts at tension or thrills. Trading in, instead, trite boredom.

ABC News critic Peter Travers colorfully quips, "You know a ghost story is a hot mess when it strands a stellar Amanda Seyfried and a top cast in a remote, country house haunted by toxic masculinity, dangling plot threads and nothing worth hearing or seeing." Almost unanimously across the board, critics agreed that Seyfried shouldn't be looped in with this mess of a film, as David Ehrlich at IndieWire says, "[W]hile Seyfried acquits herself and then some, an actor of her talent is wasted on a character that spends most of the movie just connecting the dots."

I have to imagine that the 38% of critics who liked this film , only did so because of Seyfried.

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By Damon Wise

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Seconds later a voice calls her back: “How did you get this number?” The voice is calling from a payphone in a dive bar, and Margaret explains she was given his number for times exactly like this. As if paraphrasing an ’80s action poster, she tells him what she was told about him: “There’s only one man in this city that can do what you do. This man is a professional. This man is an expert .” He agrees to take the job and arrives within the hour after giving Margaret strict instructions to sit tight and not touch a single thing.

RELATED: Apple Original Films Sets Sequel To George Clooney-Brad Pitt Drama ‘Wolfs’ As Film Pivots To Limited Theatrical Release Before Apple TV+ Bow

As a mop-up procedural, Wolfs is often very funny and most ingenious. Both men have thoughtfully brought clean outfits for the blood-soaked Kretzer to wear, and there’s a delicious moment where she takes a skirt from one man and a top from the other, leaving both slightly crestfallen. It quickly transpires that they are very, very competitive, and there’s a stylized, almost Hitchcockian vibe to the opening scenario, lightly reminiscent of Rope , as the two men quibble over the dark art of fixing.

The stakes ramp up slightly when Pam’s Man finds a bag tucked away behind a sideboard; inside are four bricks of a drug that looks suspiciously like heroin. This, obviously changes everything, and Pam, justifiably, freaks out, not wanting her bijou hotel getting caught in the crossfire of a cartel drug war. However, this isn’t the only humdinger of a surprise in store: the boy is not dead, and somehow he escapes their normally capable clutches, leading to an extraordinarily complicated chase that finds Margaret’s Man and Pam’s Man orchestrating a pincer movement by foot and by car.

This, however, is merely the starting point for a genial action comedy that, to be frank, will appeal mostly to audiences over 40, raised on a diet of movies with jaded, wisecracking characters that were born too old for this s—. The camaraderie is palpable and genuine, but the repartee is forced in comparison to the gentle physical comedy that both are so good at (and which they telegraphed so well in their best joint effort, the Coens’ 2008 Burn After Reading ). The rat-a-tat dialogue, which at times seems self-congratulatory rather than funny, is particularly wearing, distracting from the needlessly verbose final reveal, which comes out (or does it?) in a head-spinning back-and-forth.

Luckily, both are old pros, but their over-familiarity does rob the film of surprise, which is sorely needed for a well-worn caper about stolen drugs and a vicious Croatian crimelord (played by Zlatko Burić in a criminally undercooked role). In this sense, Austin Abrams is the film’s MVP, the body from the hotel room, whose protestations (“I’m not a prostitute!”) fall on deaf ears and whose surprising backstory adds an interesting third wheel to the Midnight Run -style mismatched buddy premise.

Unsurprisingly, despite serving up the old Butch and Sundance ending, the film leaves the door wide open for a sequel — who is the fixer behind the fixers? — and, in stark opposition to the diminishing returns of the Ocean’s franchise, another go-around might actually nail things down. In fact, Watts is likely thinking of the Wolfverse right now …

Title:  Wolfs Festival:   Venice  (Out of Competition) Distributor:  Apple TV+ Director-screenwriter:  Jon Watts Cast:  Brad Pitt, George Clooney , Amy Ryan, Austin Abrams, Poorna Jagannathan, Zlatko Burić, Richard Kind Running time:  1 hr 48 mins

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‘The Wasp’ Review: Naomie Harris and Natalie Dormer Play Old Friends With Fresh Grievances

Director Guillem Morales tries to trick the audience with too many plot twists, but winds up diluting the effectiveness of his thriller.

By Murtada Elfadl

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Early on in “The Wasp,” Naomie Harris provides an elaborate description of tarantula hawks, a species of spiders that feeds on other tarantulas. They paralyze their prey before eating them alive. It’s a gruesome idea that writer-director Guillem Morales clearly intends to circle back around to in his twisty two-hander, which stars Natalie Dormer and Harris as two former friends embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game of violence and intimidation. Unfortunately, Harris’ monologue marks the highlight of the film. None of the plot swerves — and there are far too many of them — manage to reach that apex of encroaching dread.

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As the plot gets more gimmicky, Harris’ performance gets weaker. She teases out the psychology of a woman crumbling under unmet expectations who is also unsupported by her husband. But as the plot contorts Heather into histrionics, Harris cannot bring enough credibility to the character. Meanwhile, Dormer goes in the other direction. She starts as a stereotype of a working-class complainer, but keeps adding complex shades to the character as the film goes on, subtly revealing the pain behind the anger. Both actresses could have benefitted from a screenplay that prioritized character over trying to bewilder audiences for cheap thrills. 

Morales, who directed many episodes of the morbidly humorous British TV anthology series “Inside No. 9,” should have tried to bring more of that dark wit to this film. Here there are too many schematic storylines, not enough playfulness. Morales wisely relies on his two lead actors to bring taut vitality to the proceedings. However, as he keeps putting in many circular scenes that don’t differ much from each other, the intensity of their performances starts to feel inconsistent. 

“The Wasp” had the potential to pay off that early promise, but in relying too much on tricking the audience, it loses the narrative thread and leaves its capable cast stranded. This is a case of a screenplay that pushes too hard toward shrewd reveals but loses its way and ends somewhere between dubious and improbable.

Reviewed online, Aug. 28, 2024. In Tribeca Film Festival. Running time: 95 MIN.

• Production: (U.K.) A Shout! Studios release of an XYZ Films presentation of a Royal Viking, Paradise City, Tea Shop production, in association with IPR.VC, Shout! Studios. Producers: Leonara Darby, James Harris, Sean Sorensen, Matthew B. Schmidt, Maxime Cottray, Nate Bolotin. Executive Producers: Jordan Fields, Julie Dankser, Mark Lane, Dean Buchanan, Ali Jazayeri, David Gendron, Naomie Harris, Natalie Dormer, Nick Spicer, Aram Tertzakian.
• Crew: Director: Guillem Morales. Screenplay: Morgan Lloyd Maclolm, based on the play by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm. Camera: John Sorapure. Editors: Joe Randall-Cutler, Ryan Morrison. Music: Adam Janota Bzowski.
• With: Naomie Harris, Natalie Dormer, Dominic Allburn, Leah Mondesir-Simmonds, Olivia Juno-Cleverley.

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Let’s Talk About the Twist Ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s Old

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

From the moment The Sixth Sense blew audiences’ minds with a shocking conclusion so well conceived it helped mainstream the phrase “no spoilers, please” — M. Night Shyamalan ’s name has been synonymous with the twist ending . Old , his latest film, recalls the strengths the auteur first displayed on The Sixth Sense : An advanced ability to hook viewers with a mystifying premise plus the capacity to explore big themes like mortality and regret in the space of a fright. Old also exemplifies the faults in the director’s later efforts: a penchant for problematic portrayals of mental health and rudderless camerawork in service of a surprise that doesn’t feel earned.

Old begins simply: An apparently perfect family composed of mother Prisca (Vicky Krieps), father Guy (Gael García Bernal), their 6-year old son Trent (Nolan River), and their 11-year old daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton), travel to a paradisal island for a restive vacation. The island seems perfect: The hotel staff throws a welcome party, complimentary cocktails are offered, and the calendar is stuffed with events like parasailing, dance classes, etc. Trent even makes quick friends with a lonely local boy Idlib (Kailen Jude), who possesses valuable secrets concerning the island.

The affable resort manager tells the family of a private picturesque beach to visit. Upon arriving at the seaside oasis, however, not only do the family’s underlying pains spring to the surface, the sandy supernatural landscape seems to cause them to age rapidly. (Two years every hour, to be exact.) Trapped on the beach with two other families, surrounded by natural barriers, the imprisoned vacationers engage in a fight for survival against the elements and one another. In the horrors of Old is an imperative message: Savor life’s every minute.

If only the film’s ending lived up to that lofty mandate. Instead, the slow burn of a journey the characters take is more enlightening than the eventual twist. Along the way, we discover that Prisca, diagnosed with a benign tumor, cheated on Guy and the couple are nearing a divorce; within earshot of their children, each accuse the other of blowing up the marriage. But on the beach they do grow closer again, leaning on each other as Guy goes blind and Prisca grows deaf. By their death of old age, which they reach in a span of a day by the seaside, they barely remember what they were fighting about, deciding that it wasn’t so important in the context of their lifelong love.

A violent, schizophrenic cardiothoracic surgeon named Charles is also confined to the beach — providing a distasteful albeit common trope of a character who appears in even Shyamalan’s finest films. But Charles isn’t the most intriguing member of his family. Rather his vain, bombshell wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) is the one to watch, the physical wear and tear of aging propelling her to a vicious mental breakdown, devolving to a kind of monstrous cave dweller. Is the horror filmmaker making a grand statement about ephemeral beauty standards? If so, then why does Chrystal become the movie’s single victim of blatant body horror, Suspiria style? (In another, more emotionally horrifying scene, a pregnant woman gives birth to a baby who, because of the time-warping nonsense of the beach, dies with a minute of being alive on the beach.)

Shyamalan undercuts many of his most fascinating plotlines in several mind-numbing missteps, namely by neatly sweeping away any lingering questions from the audience. It’s revealed that, yes, other families have died on this beach — they are why rusted silverware, clothes, and notebooks could be found buried in the sands. One found journal, replete with hand-sketched pictures, plainly explains why they’re unable to escape: The surrounding rocks are magnetized, somehow causing black-out headaches to anyone who dares to traverse them. (Between Old and F9 , magnets are becoming an essential 2021 plot device. At least with Old, there are no hints that we’re getting some larger, Shyamalan cinematic universe.)

But it’s Trent’s sneaking suspicion that the vacationers are being watched from a hillside that left me groaning into the ether. We learn that the driver who first took them to the beach — played by Shyamalan himself — has been spying on them the whole time. He works for a band of scientists who have been using the beach to try out various pharmaceutical drugs on sick, at-risk humans in an accelerated environment. (Each family, it turns out, included a member with a preexisting health condition. The test subjects’ rapid aging allowed the pharmaceutical companies to discover the “lifelong” effects of a drug in no time at all.) The families on the beach were merely guinea pigs.

The now adult Trent and Maddox, the only two survivors by the movie’s end, eventually escape from the beach thanks to a clue from Idlib, who tells them to swim through the (non-magnetized?) coral reefs. They arrive on the mainland to expose the nefarious scientist to the world, but nothing in their final scene, of Trent and Maddox helicoptering home to their aunt, is as emotionally satisfying as their time on the beach. (Why do these two adults need to be entrusted to their aunt? How, exactly, did they blow the whistle on the pharma baddies?) By inserting himself into the narrative, a common technique for Shyamalan, is the director poking fun at his reputation for caring more for puzzles than characters? I don’t think he entirely knows. He has the premise but not the experiential grounding to stick a philosophical landing.

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Your guide to the latest plot twists and surprise endings, now playing at a theater near you!

The Kapa family – parents Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and kids Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River) – arrive at a fancy resort for a family vacation. After settling into their rooms, Trent befriends a young boy named Idlib (Kailen Jude), and they do activities like ask other resort patrons what their names and jobs are, and Idlib shows Trent a special code to decipher messages. Meanwhile, Guy and Prisca discuss that this is just one last trip they wanted to give the kids before they divorce, which is made worse because Prisca is suffering from a tumor.

At breakfast, a doctor named Charles (Rufus Sewell) is sitting with his young vain wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), daughter Kara (Kyle Bailey), and mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Nearby, a woman named Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is having an epileptic seizure, which Charles helps with while her husband Jarin (Ken Leung) also tries to help. Trent also spots Idlib, as they made plans to hang out again that day, but the resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) makes him leave the area.

The Kapas, plus Charles and his family, all board a van that takes them to a private beach. There, Maddox recognizes a rapper, Mid-Size Sedan/real name Brendan (Aaron Pierre), who was earlier seen with a female companion who went skinny-dipping. The kids all play together while the adults lounge on the sand. The girls find old dolls buried in the sand, left behind by other kids. Trent swims by a cave when he discovers the body of Brendan’s companion, apparently having drowned. The adults examine the body, while Brendan is suffering from nosebleeds and is equally stunned at the discovery. Charles suspects Brendan of foul play, though he maintains that the woman only went for a swim and never came back. Not long after, Agnes begins to fall short of breath before she also dies.

Jarin and Patricia arrive at the beach as well, but the people who brought them are already gone. The kids also start to experience something weird. Brendan explains to the adults that the woman he was with had multiple sclerosis while he has hemophilia, which explains his constant nosebleeds. Jarin and Patricia talk to Trent and Maddox, who have suddenly aged up (Trent now played by Luca Faustino Rodriguez, Maddox played by Thomasin McKenzie), along with Kara (now played by Mikayla Fisher).

Several attempts are made to leave the beach, by going through the rocks that close off the beach from the outside, but all the adults that attempt to pass through feel a pounding in their heads before they black out and end up back on the beach. They also notice unusual things, like when Charles attacks Brendan with a knife, the slash mark heals within seconds. Not long after, Brendan finds that the body of the woman he was with has now fully decomposed to nothing but bones within hours, making them realize that there is something time-related occurring on the beach. Suddenly, the tumor in Prisca’s stomach starts to cause her pain and distress. The adults try to help her, with them feeling around for the tumor at first and describing it as the size of a golf ball. They proceed to perform a surgery to remove the tumor, which has grown to the size of a cantaloupe. The cut in Prisca’s stomach heals rapidly after the procedure.

Trent and Kara age up even more (Trent now played by Alex Wolff, Kara played by Eliza Scanlen). What’s more is that Kara has somehow become five months pregnant within a matter of minutes. The adults prepare themselves for the birth, which happens rather quickly, but the baby dies after a minute due to lack of attention. The other adults start to show more visible signs of aging, but Chrystal takes the process much harder than the others.

Charles starts to lose his mind to schizophrenia, leading him to stab Brendan to death. The others take his weapon away while trying to come up with an alternate plan of escape. Knowing they can’t go through the rocks, Jarin attempts to swim to find a way out. While this happens, Trent and Maddox come across a notebook left by a previous visitor, with names and medical conditions written down. They also notice what looks like people in the distance observing them.

Maddox talks to Prisca about whether or not she and Guy are splitting up. Prisca admits that she was seeing another man. Although Prisca tries to explain herself, Maddox is angry with her. She goes out to the beach and attempts to be strong and find a way out herself, but she finds Jarin’s body, apparently having gone unconscious and drowned. Upon seeing his body, Patricia suffers a fatal seizure. Kara then desperately tries to find a way out and starts climbing up the rocks to try and make it to the top, but before she can make it high enough, she blacks out and falls to her death, leaving Trent devastated.

It is now nighttime. Charles has become fully unhinged while Chrystal is also losing her mind at her rapid aging and declining physical state (she has grown a hunchback). Guy is also losing his sight, and Prisca is noticeably grayer. Guy and Prisca talk about the other man in Prisca’s life, with Guy admitting he knew about him and wished that he did more to keep their marriage working, but he also notes that the other guy is a loser and that she deserves someone better. Charles then starts to attack Guy and Prisca, while Trent and Maddox are attacked by Chrystal when they try to look at her. She follows them into the cave and her body becomes twisted and contorted to horrible angles before she dies there. Prisca then slashes Charles with a rusty knife, causing an infection that rapidly spreads through his body and kills him.

The Kapas then gather around the campfire and the beach. Guy is having a hard time speaking and remembering things, but he essentially admits to Prisca that he still loves her just before he dies. Prisca then stands up for a moment but collapses and dies by Guy’s side while both kids mourn their parents.

In the morning, Trent and Maddox are now in their 50’s (Trent played by Emun Elliott, Maddox played by Embeth Davidtz). Trent brings up a code that Idlib gave him, which he deciphered and figured out means “My uncle doesn’t like the coral”. The siblings spot a coral reef nearby and realize that it must be their way out. The two swim out there, but Maddox’s clothing gets stuck on the coral. When the two don’t resurface, the van driver that brought the families to the beach (M. Night Shyamalan) reports to his bosses that all members of “Trial 73” have perished.

It is then revealed that the resort is a front for a medical research team that lures people with medical conditions to the beach in order to perform clinical trials for life-saving drugs, given to them in the cocktails served upon arriving. They know that the beach speeds up the aging process, so they reduce the trials to a whole day for better results. They believe they cured Patricia’s epilepsy since she didn’t have a seizure for eight hours, which is equivalent to about 16 years on the beach.

The resort manager and others attempt to poach their latest victims until they are stopped by Trent and Maddox, who managed to free themselves from the coral. Trent finds a man he spoke to when he was still a kid, knowing the man is a police officer. He hands the man the journal found on the beach, which details the names of many missing people and their medical conditions. Idlib comes out and recognizes Trent even as an adult. Trent and Maddox reveal the truth to everyone while all the resort staff realizes they are screwed.

Authorities come to arrest all the resort employees, while the officer takes Trent and Maddox to be with their aunt, who is not ready to see that her niece and nephew are full-grown adults.

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Two families, a couple, and a rapper are brought to a private beach outside a resort for what is meant to be a relaxing vacation. Instead, things turn to horror when everyone finds that they are aging rapidly, with the kids turning to teenagers within a matter of hours. Everyone dies due to the aging, underlying medical conditions, or failed attempts to escape the beach (as well as two counts of murder), leaving only siblings Trent and Maddox as the remaining survivors, having aged from 6 and 11 to their 50's.

The big twist is that the resort is a front for a medical research facility that brings people with underlying medical conditions to the beach to perform clinical trials for revolutionary drugs. For instance, the woman in the couple (Patricia) had epilepsy and did not suffer a seizure for eight hours, equivalent to 16 years on the beach. Trent and Maddox's mother Prisca had a tumor that was almost easily removed as well. Trent and Maddox manage to escape the beach through a coral reef and provide evidence of the resort's evil deeds to the authorities with a journal containing names of previous victims of the beach and their medical conditions, leading to the resort employees all getting arrested. Trent and Maddox remain adults and are going to stay with their aunt.

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Old, review: A provocative horror that brings out the best and worst in M Night Shyamalan

‘sixth sense’ maestro seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot holes than creating wonder, article bookmarked.

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Dir: M Night Shyamalan. Starring: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee. 15, 108 mins.

M Night Shyamalan still can’t quite shake his reputation as the king of plot twists. It doesn’t matter what he’s done in the decades since Haley Joel Osment saw dead people. The label has stuck. And it’s not quite a fair one. Shyamalan shouldn’t be defined by his twists, but by his constant unpredictability. It’s a subtle but important difference. What makes his horror films so effective – when they’re at their best, at least – is that he allows his stories to exist in a sense of perpetual tension. At any moment, the path might change. They could slip wildly into a different genre. New nightmares could emerge from any corner. What determines whether a Shyamalan film is good or bad is how he deals with that build-up of terror. Does he let it linger menacingly in the air? Or try to soothe it out of his audience’s minds with a tidy ending? Old , in that sense, brings out both the best and worst in him.

In its opening scene, we’re introduced to what should be a blissful scenario: a wealthy, nuclear family on a tropical vacation. The parents, Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), gaze adoringly as their young children zoom around their hotel room. But the camera sits waiting on the outside, watching them through the windows, pacing up and down like a jaguar readying for the kill. What hidden torment will soon be revealed to us? Old feels like a repeat of Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village – it’s provocative and inventive right until the point the director retreats into narrative neatness and conventional emotions.

A manager suggests the family spend the day at a private beach – one of those little-known hotspots that all holidaymakers crave. They’re soon joined by a second family – a doctor ( Rufus Sewell ), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and his modelesque wife (Abbey Lee), plus his young child. A little later, another couple, played by Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird, arrive. A dead body, floating facedown in the water, is the real starting point for Old ’s reign of terror. There’s a man, too, crouched in the shadows, who nervously reveals himself to be a popular rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) – it’s unclear whether the name is intended as a joke or just a sign of cultural disconnect.

But there’s a strangeness that starts to consume these people the very second they step foot on the beach. They can’t quite put their finger on it. But their bodies simply don’t quite feel like their bodies any more. The truth is that their cells have started to age rapidly – the reason why is part of the great mystery Shyamalan knows his audience will be eager to solve. Although the film is actually an adaptation of the Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle , by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, the director has provided his own resolution to the story.

All the implicit themes at play here – not only of our general fears of ageing, but of the doomed inevitability that our medical histories create – run strongly throughout Old . There’s a primal potency to them. But the film, just like The Village , suffers from Shyamalan’s desire to forever chase a sense of order within the universe. Sometimes this can actually be quite refreshing – Old is the rare horror where the characters are all hypercompetent – but Shyamalan’s persistent refusal to leave behind any wonder, or instability, ultimately strips Old of its staying power. He seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot hole that might send Reddit users into a rage than he does in creating something emotionally satisfying. It’s hard to talk about his films as something more than their endings when it’s the endings that always seem to decide their fate.

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A family heads to a secluded beach vacation. They speak vaguely of the passage of time in a way that parents often do with their children, as mom mentions how she can’t wait to hear her daughter’s singing voice when she grows up. Shortly thereafter, it’s revealed that mom may not be able to do that because she has a tumor and this could be a “last trip,” either because of her physical health or the health of her crumbling marriage. The passage of time changes at different points in your life, but especially when you see your kids growing up too fast and when you worry you might not be able to witness the bulk of their journey. When M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” based on the book by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters, is playing thematically with those feelings and allowing itself to be surreal and scary in the process, it truly works. When it feels like it has to nail down specifics, such as in a disappointing final stretch, it crosses that median line into the silly lane. The mysteries of aging are something everyone considers—“Old” taps into those considerations with just enough style to engage before stepping back from its own edge.

The family in the opening scene consists of Guy ( Gael García Bernal ), Prisca ( Vicky Krieps ), Trent ( Nolan River ) and Maddox ( Alexa Swinton ). The resort manager tells them about a secluded beach where they can avoid the touristy crowds, and they’re taken there by none other than Shyamalan himself in maybe his most meta cameo (after all, he’s the director, assembling all of his players on the sandy stage). Guy and Prisca’s clan isn’t alone. They’re joined by a doctor named Charles ( Rufus Sewell ), his wife Chrystal ( Abbey Lee ), his mother Agnes ( Kathleen Chalfant ) and his daughter Kara ( Mikaya Fisher ). A third couple joins them in Jarin ( Ken Leung ) and Patricia ( Nikki Amuka-Bird ). All of the travelers meet a mysterious traveler at the beach when they arrive in a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan ( Aaron Pierre ). And why is he bleeding from his nose? And is that a dead body?

From their arrival, the beauty of this beach, surrounded by steep stone, feels threatening. The waves crash and the rock wall almost seems to grow taller as the day goes on. When they try to walk back the way they came, they get faint and wake up on the beach again. And then things get really weird when Trent and Maddox are suddenly significantly older, jumping about five years in a couple hours. The adults figure out that every half-hour on this beach is like a year off of it. As the kids age into Alex Wolff , Eliza Scanlen , and the great Thomasin McKenzie , the adults face their own physical issues, including hearing/vision problems, dementia, and that damn tumor in Prisca’s body. Can they get off the beach before 24 hours age them 48 years?

What a clever idea. Rod Serling would have loved it. And “Old” is very effective when Shyamalan is being playful and quick with his high concept. “Old” doesn’t really feel like a traditional mystery. I never once cared about “figuring out” what was happening to this crew, enjoying “Old” far more as surreal horror than as a thriller that demanded explanations. Having said that, it sometimes feels like Shyamalan and his team have to pull punches to hold that PG-13. I wondered about the truly gruesome, Cronenberg version of this story that doesn’t shy away from what happens to the human body over time and doesn’t feel a need to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.

The actors all seem like they would have been willing to go on that more surreal journey. Most of the ensemble finds a way to push through a script that really uses them like a kid uses sand toys on a beach, moving them around before they wash away with the tide. Stand-outs include Sewell’s confused menace, McKenzie’s palpable fear (she nails that the best, by far, understanding she’s in a horror movie more than some of the others), and the grounded center provided by Bernal and Krieps.

A director who often veers right when he should arguably go left, Shyamalan and his collaborators manage their tone here better than he has in years. Yes, the dialogue is clunky and almost entirely expositional regarding their plight and attempts to escape it, but that’s a feature, not a bug. “Old” should have an exaggerated, surreal tone and Shyamalan mostly keeps that in place, assisted greatly by some of the best work yet by his regular cinematographer Mike Gioulakis . The pair are constantly playing with perception and forced POV, fluidly gliding their camera up and down the beach as if it’s rushing to catch up with all the developments as they happen. Some of the framing here is inspired, catching a corner of a character’s head before revealing they’re now being played by a new actor. It’s as visually vibrant a film as Shyamalan has made in years, at its best when it’s embracing its insanity. The waves are so loud and the rock wall is so imposing that they almost feel like characters.     

Sadly, the film crashes when it decides to offer some sane explanations and connect dots that didn’t really need to be connected. There’s a much stronger version of “Old” that ends more ambiguously, allowing viewers to leave the theatre playing around with themes instead of unpacking exactly what was going on. The conversation around Shyamalan often focuses on his final scenes, and I found the ones in “Old” some of his most frustrating given how they feel oppositional to what works best about the movie. When his characters are literally trying to escape the passage of time, as people do when their kids are growing up too fast or they receive a mortality diagnosis, “Old” is fascinating and entertaining. It’s just too bad that it doesn’t age into its potential.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

• Gael García Bernal as Guy
• Vicky Krieps as Prisca
• Rufus Sewell as Charles
• Alex Wolff as Trent Aged 15
• Nikki Amuka-Bird as Patricia
• Brett M. Reed

Writer (based on the graphic novel "Sandcastle" by)

• Frederick Peeters
• Pierre-Oscar Levy
• M. Night Shyamalan

Cinematographer

• Mike Gioulakis
• Trevor Gureckis

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Den of Geek

Old: M. Night Shyamalan’s Twist Ending Explained

M. Night Shyamalan’s latest movie, Old, is as twisty-turny as you might expect. Here’s what the ending means.

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Contains spoilers for Old.

Old is the new chiller from director and screenwriter M. Night Shyamalan who is very well known for his twisty plots and rug pull endings. Fans who go to the cinema for that will not be disappointed.  

Inspired by the graphic novel Sandcastle , by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old sees a family on a dream holiday get taken to a secluded private beach which they discover is causing them to age very rapidly. But how? And why?

Well, that’s not revealed until the end of the movie. Here we break down what happens and what it all means.

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Who Dies in Old?

In short: everyone except Trent and Maddox, the now grown children of the family we begin our journey with. But characters die in different ways and that’s significant. Old is thematically MASSIVE. It essentially attempts to sum up the entire human experience in one movie, indicating a variety of ways a life could go – with twists and turns of course.

Rufus Sewell’s Charles is a doctor with racist tendencies and his rapid dementia sees him become violent. He murders rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), tries to kill Guy (Gael García Bernal), and eventually is killed himself by Prisca (Vicky Krieps), who stabs him with a rusty implement giving him super-rapid blood poisoning. His mother has already died of what seems to be a heart condition at the start of the movie.

His wife Crystal’s (Abbey Lee) calcium deficiency causes the most horrific deterioration scene in the whole movie; her bones crunch and become contorted into hideous and unnatural shapes as they crack and then heal too quickly. It’s a medical condition, sure, but there’s an implicit judgement of Crystal in the background. The beautiful, much-younger wife of Charles is positioned as being overly fond of her looks and as she starts to age and her body lets her down, she hides in a cave in the darkness rather than be with other people. 

Crystal’s daughter Kara goes from being a little kid to a teenager, is pregnant, and immediately loses the baby (harrowing). Later she tries to climb her way to freedom but falls to her death.

This is a doomed family: a disjointed group who essentially all die horribly and alone, as opposed to the family we meet at the start. Mum Prisca is thinking of divorcing Dad Guy; she’s been having an affair, but both parents love their children fiercely and ultimately love each other too.

Only Prisca and Guy are given a ‘good death’ – they live out the minutes of their lives together. The couple reunite and solve their differences, row with each other and their children but eventually make peace with themselves. Though she has lost the hearing in one ear and his vision is severely impaired, they sit together on the beach at the end of their all too short lives and agree there is nowhere they would rather be than together.

Third couple Jarin (Ken Leung) and Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) have narratively significant deaths. Jarin attempts to rescue the group by swimming around the coast, but despite being a strong swimmer he doesn’t survive. This death emphasizes that the group has tried everything and can’t escape. Meanwhile Patricia dies of an epileptic episode. This becomes very significant later in the movie when we understand the drugs she’s been given have prevented an episode from happening for 16 years (more on this later).

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What’s the deal with the rapper?

The first people at the island are a famous rapper (according to young Maddox) with the stage name Mid-Sized Sedan (real name Brendan) and the woman he is with. She has taken a swim (naked) and later washes up dead, sparking the first wave of conflict on the beach as racist Charles immediately accuses Kevin of murdering the woman. 

As a catalyst this works narratively and comes loosely from the graphic novel Sandcastle though in Sandcastle the man is an Algerian Jeweler rather than a Black rapper. 

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We do wonder though, why, when his companion swam out into the sea he wouldn’t have been a bit more bothered about that and wouldn’t have asked the others for help as soon as they arrived? Also her body doesn’t appear to be especially decomposed when she washes up (while she decomposes very rapidly once on the beach).

Any thoughts about what’s going on here? Let us know in the comments.

So what is actually going on with the beach?

Electromagnetic material surrounding the beach is causing cells to age incredibly quickly – at the rate of around a year every half an hour. The kids are still growing so their aging is more obvious than the adult characters. The adults don’t get grey hair, according to a throwaway line, because hair and cells are dead and so aren’t affected – the same reasoning why they don’t all suddenly have very long hair and fingernails.

Though the film has a strong existential and allegorical angle there is actually, in theory, a real world solution – as in, the answer is ‘science’ and not ‘magic.’ This is why there are no fish in the water on the beach, and why it’s significant that when Trent and Maddox emerge from the other side of the coral they suddenly see a school of fish. The explanation for why they can’t just leave the way they came is that reversing the rate of aging very quickly causes an enormous shock to the system (like resurfacing too fast from deep sea diving), which causes them to black out before they can get anywhere.

So why on earth has the holiday resort actively decided to send people – and these people specifically – to suffer a horrific fate on the beach?

Turns out the resort is really an incredibly elaborate front for a pharmaceutical company…

What does the pharmaceutical company want and why?

This pharmaceutical agency discovers the beach and sees the potential for whole-of-life medical trials to be carried out in just over a day. In theory these trials mean vital medicines can be tested incredibly rapidly for efficacy and also for side effects. Okay, not terribly reliably – medical trials don’t tend to involve observing patients from a distance with no actual lab tests and checks, and the beach is hardly a real-life adjacent or controlled environment. But this is the logic.

Candidates are selected who are having treatment for various specific conditions already. Prisca has a tumor which she thinks is benign, and it’s through her that her family is selected. Others on the beach with them also turn out to have conditions. 

The facility has arranged all of the families’ travel and accommodation and taken their passports away from them – there (supposedly) is no evidence that they even left home, which is how the pharma is able to carry out its plans without being caught.

The system is flawed (it’s obviously massively morally flawed and also doesn’t hold up to medical scrutiny either since it’s hardly a meaningful test when it’s on individuals whose bodies don’t behave at all like regular people, but we digress…). One of the employees points out how unsound it is to put test subjects with neurological disorders in with those with conditions that do not affect the mind. Charles killing Mid-Sized Sedan and stabbing others rather interferes with the results.

On arrival guests are given specially mixed cocktails supposedly based on their preferences and dietary requirements – these cocktails are drugged with whichever experimental new treatment the lab wants to test. 

Another possible hitch: surely treatments aren’t usually one dose and then you’re done for your entire lifetime? But different rules apply here, hence the children needing to eat lots of food to account for their changes in body mass but the grown ups who stay at roughly the same weight don’t have the same issue. 

When the twist is finally revealed, we learn that the events we have been watching are part of trial number 73, and the team are celebrating a victory – the epilepsy drug given to Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) is a success and stopped her from having a seizure for 16 years. (Just as well Charles didn’t murder her first.)

How do Trent and Maddox finally escape?

For a time it actually looks like they haven’t escaped. M. Night Shyamalan’s nefarious surveiller who has been watching the island the whole time is convinced the two have drowned.

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Thank goodness, though, that they have not. While we know countless families before them have died on the island, it still would have been almost too unpleasant not to spare these two. For a start we’ve been with them the whole movie, they’re our focal characters and all of the different actors who play the two as they grow keep us hooked. But these are all children – 11 and six at the start, who’s lives really are being stolen from them. They are not sick. They are not instrumental in progressing medical research. No fancy drugged cocktails for the kids, they are literally collateral damage – loose ends to be tied up. Kara has plummeted to her death but the now grown up Maddox and Trent (Amon Elliot and Embeth Davidtz) are the last hope.

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And it turns out to be another child that is their salvation. Trent remembers that he never translated the note that his young pal Idlib (Kailen Jude) gave him in their special code. With frankly nothing more pressing to do than await his death, adult Trent decides to take a look. The amazing Idlib has given him a clue about his uncle not liking the coral. Turns out the tunnel of coral provides the sort of casing it requires for them to be able to get away from the force of the beach without immediately blacking out.

What about the diary?

The diary left by a previous islander is key to the ending of the movie, avoiding having to waste the audience’s time with police incredulity. 

Back at the resort having escaped the beach, the now grown Trent spots a man he’d met when he was six and playing the (narratively handy) game ‘what’s your name, and what is your occupation?’ This guy, he remembers, is a cop.

The diary documents all the things learned by another victim of the beach and the families that were there during that trial. It documents the names of everyone on the beach, as well as the things this person – who, like Trent and Maddox, was a child when they arrived – learned during their last days. The cop is able to quickly cross reference and find that everyone on the list is a missing person, missing at the same time.

Maddox and Trent get their happy ending (kind of) – they are able to expose the dodgy pharma company, prevent any further victims, and are airlifted away after saying a sad and grateful farewell to Idlib, who is very much still a child. 

We do need this ending. The film as a whole is incredibly bleak, and giving these two a chance to save the day is a tonic. Old is careful not to present this ending as too cheerful though. In the flight away from the resort Trent talks about contacting his aunt and when asked about his reaction he replies:

“How would you feel if a 50-year-old man called and said he was your six-year-old nephew?”

They are free and they are alive, but what will happen to Trent and Maddox now is a different story.

Old is out now in cinemas.

Rosie Fletcher

Rosie Fletcher is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Den Of Geek. She’s been an entertainment journalist for more than 15 years previously working at DVD & Blu-ray Review, Digital…

The Ending Of Old Explained

Warning: Contains spoilers for "Old"

If nothing else, writer/director M. Night Shyamalan is a man who knows how to end a movie. Sure, sometimes his endings are baffling to a fault, but even when every other element in his films fails to move the needle with the viewer, they're guaranteed to be gobsmacked by his twisty conclusions, usually tuned specifically to upend everything they've seen up to the point of their devastating reveals. From 1999's "The Sixth Sense" to 2002's "Signs," from 2008's "The Happening" through the "Unbreakable/Split/Glass" trilogy, he's been doing it for more than twenty years now.

Shyamalan's latest film "Old" (based on the French graphic novel "Sandcastle" ) is no different, delivering a stunner of a third act paradigm shift that leaves the audience with plenty to unpack.

Though the film is chock full of ancillary mysteries and unresolved strangeness, its central concern is unraveling the true nature of the supernatural beach head serving as the film's primary location. Three families (led by an eclectic cast including Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell and others) each make their way to a secluded beach at a private resort only to discover two unfortunate developments — that time passes so fast here a lifetime will unfold in a single day, and there is no way to escape.

But despite that rather straightforward premise, the answers waiting at the end of "Old" are more complex than they first appear.

A day in the life

Throughout "Old" and its brisk 108 minute runtime, the viewer is repeatedly bombarded with new information and consternating wrinkles within the film's central conflict, but beneath all the intrigue lies the ticking time clock of the cast's survival. 

When the beach excursion begins, there are eleven characters with their toes in the sand. There's insurance actuary Guy (Bernal), his wife Prisca (Krieps) and their kids Maddox and Trent, each played by a trio of performers as they rapidly age over the course of the day. But they're joined by Rufus Sewell's doctor Charles, his wife Christal (Abbey Lee), his mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant) and their daughter Kara (also played by a trio of actors). Add to that, rapper Mid-Size Sedan (Aaron Pierre) who was on the beach when they arrived, and nurse Jarin (Ken Leung) alongside his wife Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a psychologist, and you've got a whodunit-sized cast of individuals of varied ages, each hurdling towards certain death from accelerated circumstances if they can't make it off the beach.

But one by one, as every potential exit proves untenable — trying to swim against the current kills Jarin, climbing the cliffside and falling fells an adult-aged Kara, everyone who tries to traverse the caverns surrounding the beach blacks out — the surviving inhabitants each succumb to the hardships of aging in their own respective ways, while accepting their fate and trying to enjoy the present with their remaining loved ones.

Guy and Prisca, on the verge of divorce when the film begins due to infidelity and a benign tumor causing the duo to doubt their future together, have no choice but to forget the troubles of the life they led before arriving in this peculiar nexus. Guy slowly loses his vision and Prisca, her hearing, but the two work together to fend off the violent threat of Charles — the doctor hiding a burgeoning schizophrenia that consumes him as the beach ages his mind by years in hours.

Nearly adult-aged Maddox and Trent (played by Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff respectively) must hide from Christal, who has similarly lost her mind and is trying to murder them by heaving rocks from afar. The core family spends one final moonlit moment together, enjoying the peace and tranquility they initially sought this vacation for, even under suboptimal conditions (certain death looming on the horizon, for instance). Guy and Prisca die within moments of one another, mimicking a sped up version of how often elderly couples die within months of each other. 

When the sun rises the next morning, Maddox (now played by Embeth Davidtz) and Trent (Emun Elliott), who began this journey aged 11 and 6, find themselves in middle age, positive they will die but choosing to give escape one last chance. But not before building a sandcastle together, for old times' (yesterday's) sake. In the ensuing play date, Trent remembers the code-breaking game he played with Idlib (Kailen Jude), a child they met at the resort the day before. Idlib seemed to know more about this strange location than he was able to let on, but when Trent decodes the final letter he got before they came to the beach, it reveals a portentous message about the potentially protective powers of the nearby coral.

This convinces Maddox and Trent that swimming through the coral may protect them long enough to get away from the beach and whatever mysterious energies have been hounding them.

But when they try to make this underwater trek, Maddox gets her swimsuit caught and the two appear to drown, the final members of this trip extinguished for good. 

The men behind the curtain

It is at this point that the film pulls back to reveal the murky figure that has been observing the beach this entire time, heretofore only seen in glimpses from afar. 

It's the hotel van driver who dropped them all off in the first place, played by M. Night Shyamalan himself (Shyamalan, much like Alfred Hitchcock in his day, has long made it a point to cameo in the films he directs). But he's no simple hotel employee. Based on the interactions he has over his phone, he is one of the resort's many researchers, and everything we have seen unfold is just part of a larger experiment. The 73rd in a series, it would seem.

The Resort Manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) is actually in charge of this facility, which was erected to understand the natural anomaly of the beach and figure out how to use its mystical properties for the betterment of mankind. Every member of the cast was chosen because of a specific ailment they suffered from, whether it be Prisca's tumor or Charles' schizophrenia, so that they could have experimental new drugs tested on them. Because of the time acceleration, medical trials that typically take years can unfold over the course of hours. Even though this cast had no survivors, the new drug they designed to help with epilepsy did prevent Patricia from having a seizure for 16 years in beach time. The gathered masses of the resort's staff consider this a huge win, because even though we the audience just watched eleven people die, the data gathered from this protracted slaughter will help save thousands of lives.

Or at least, that is how everyone involved justifies the work they do. Some of the scientists object to the specifics of procedure and how they need to stop pairing the mental health patients with the physical ailment ones, as Charles did wind up murdering multiple people over the course of the experiment, something they hint has been occurring with increasing frequency. But the Manager implies that it's unlikely they'll be changing their methods anytime soon.

It's not like anyone has survived to complain. Or have they?

The end of the experiment

Earlier in the film, Trent — when he was still a child — would walk up to every new adult character and ask them their name and occupation. It seemed like an easy way for Shyamalan to help audiences keep track of the numerous side players in "Old," but it was also seeding for the film's final twist. 

As a brand new crop of patients arrives at the resort, we see a fellow visitor from the film's opening relaxing on the patio and hear a familiar voice ask if he's a cop. We then remember Trent meeting this man the day before, and realize the voice is adult Trent who, alongside Maddox, survived the coral and is now passing along a diary a previous beach inhabitant kept, listing everyone that died from their trial, their full names and home addresses.

The cop calls home to look up some of the names, discovering that every single one of them is a missing persons case. At the same time, Trent and Maddox interrupt the new resort inhabitants from having their welcome cocktails, the delivery system used to pump them full of the experimental drugs, and begin to tell their stories to the remaining tenants, many of whom have their smartphones out recording their story. 

We see the survivors being helicoptered out of the island, as it is explained that the entire operation is being shuttered and everyone involved will be brought to justice. But Trent and Maddox must now go meet their aunt, their only remaining relative, who is now a few years their junior.

The film leaves the audience pondering a number of unresolved questions, but the one that matters the most, perhaps, is whether this experiment coming to an end is truly for the greater good or not.

Prepare for some post-theater debate amongst friends. That is, if they can stop scratching their heads long enough to form a personal thesis.

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‘Old’ Review: They Say Sun Can Age You, but This Is Ridiculous

A half-hour at the beach costs vacationers a year in this disquieting new horror puzzler, written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

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By Glenn Kenny

In the opening pages of “Dino,” a 1992 biography of Dean Martin by Nick Tosches, the author cites a haunting Italian phrase: “La vecchiaia è carogna.” “Old age is carrion.”

When some vacationing families are deposited on a secluded beach recommended to them by a smarmy resort manager in “Old,” the new movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, we see a trio of vultures atop a tree take to the sky.

Not long after that, unusual things begin happening. The young children of Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, both superb, as is the entire cast) feel their bathing suits tightening. An epileptic psychologist (Nikki Amuka-Bird) unexpectedly finds herself without symptoms. The elderly mother of the trophy wife of a tetchy physician just up and dies. A moderately famous rap star (Aaron Pierre), who had come to the beach some hours before, wanders around befuddled, with an incurable nosebleed. The corpse of his female companion is discovered in the water, prompting the physician (Rufus Sewell) to accuse the rapper of murder.

In time — not too much time, because, as it happens, it is of the essence in this situation — the beachgoers figure out that they are aging at an accelerated rate. One half-hour equals about a year.

And the beach that is aging them won’t let them leave.

Some vacation. Shyamalan adapted his disquieting tale from the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by the French writer Pierre Oscar Lévy and the Swiss illustrator Frederik Peeters. As is frequently the case with French-produced bandes dessinées, “Sandcastle” is a stark existentialist parable. (It is perhaps no coincidence that the book Krieps’s character attempts to read on the beach is a dual biography of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.) Shyamalan expands on the book in the way one would expect an American filmmaker to — among other things, eventually offering a sort-of explanation that the source material doesn’t.

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Adapted from Sandcastle , the graphic novel by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, M. Night Shyamalan’s latest mystery-thriller, Old , is different from the films he’s written and directed in the past. The film is less focused on the traditional horror elements, which is refreshing, even as it shifts towards a message that is underdeveloped when considering the big twist. Old has its moments of intrigue, of bodily horror, and themes surrounding the passage of time, but it’s too often bogged down by its tedious mystery.   

Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are planning to separate and bring their kids, Trent (Nolan River) and Maddox (Alexa Swinton), to the Anamika Resort for a last family vacation before everything in their life changes. When they and a few others — Jarin (Ken Leung), Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Charles (Rufus Sewell), and Chrystal (Abbey Lee) — are selected to visit a secluded beach for the day by the resort manager (Gustaf Hammersten), they quickly discover that time works differently there. Trapped with no hope of escape, the characters must figure out why they’ve been chosen and the reason they’re aging so rapidly.

Related:  Old Trailer Reveals M. Night Shyamalan's Supernatural Thriller

Shyamalan builds tension and suspense with close-ups of the body — faces, knees, shoulders, eyes — when the characters are working through heightened emotions and changes to their situations. The camera pans away at every physical transformation, spanning the length of the beach before settling back on its subjects. This is exciting in the sense that the outcome of the movement is a surprise to the audience, as well as another predicament for the characters. It’s also a bold choice to film all the unfolding action during the day; as the sun goes down, the looming darkness is used to reflect on the precious time lost, the life choices made, and the affection that still lingers between Prisca and Guy’s family despite everything. There’s a deep sense of wasted time on anger and enjoying the time one has, even if Old doesn’t always pull it off because it waits too long to get to that point with the characters. 

The dialogue is occasionally comical, especially when the characters are astonished by things they shouldn’t be — Prisca asks, in all seriousness, “Can you believe I found this place on the internet?” With so much of people’s time now spent online, where else would she have found the resort? However, the actors deliver their lines with such conviction, elevating the story and relationship dynamics that would have otherwise fallen flat. Old certainly nails the eerie, intense feelings that come with being trapped, of watching one’s life unfolding so quickly that it’s hard to think past the missed opportunities. As the characters grow older every half hour, the desperation and paranoia grows along with them, sometimes to dizzyingly intense degrees. That is where the thrills truly lie — how people can so quickly turn on each other because of things outside their control. The film’s sweet spot is right in the middle of its runtime, after the setup has been established, but before the reveal of what’s actually going on. This is where Shyamalan finds the balance between the story and its characters as he lingers on them and what this all means for their lives and the effects of their choices.

That said, the premise of the film is often more interesting than its execution. Aging is something society fears and avoids, with elderly abuse, age discrimination in the workforce, and the general negativity surrounding the loss of youth ever-present; the latter is on display with Chrystal, who values her youthful looks above all else. Conversely, for Trent and Maddox, what is it like to grow up too fast? When the mind of a six-year-old is suddenly a teenager with raging hormones, the impact on the body can be dangerous. To that end, Shyamalan is at least focused on the characters’ bodies, not in a creepy way, but in a fascinating, detailed close-up of its changes. Despite some of the good, Old doesn’t engage fully with the topics it sets up, including the aspect of the story introduced by the twist at the end, one that adds several more layers to the previous events. Typical of Shyamalan, the twist reframes the entirety of the film’s plot, but it’s one that will give pause regarding the exploitation of certain issues and how they’re perceived.

Sometimes, Old is bizarrely clinical despite its tension-building. When even the chills and thrills don’t work the way they should later on in the film, it leaves the audience waiting impatiently to get to the end for answers. There isn’t much time spent exploring the characters, with much of the quiet, reflective moments being relegated to the end. It doesn’t quite land an emotional punch because the plot is far more dedicated to maintaining the mystery, one that drags on unnecessarily and doesn’t provide much insight since it comes too late. The film’s primary message is tacked on at the end, with Shyamalan only dipping into the shallow end of the repercussions. So while Old is certainly a different kind of thriller, with plenty of elements that work to create a sense of tranquility and desperation in equal measure, it grows wearisome as it evades its deeper themes for the thrill of that final discovery.

Next:  How Old Is Different From M. Night Shyamalan's Other Movies

Old is releasing in theaters on the evening of Thursday, July 22. The film is 108 minutes long and is rated PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language.

Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old is a chilling, mysterious new thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly - reducing their entire lives into a single day.

• Movie Reviews
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23 Jul 2021

Nobody expects another The Sixth Sense from M. Night Shyamalan — that kind of poise generally comes only once a career — but there’s a cracked conviction to some of his silliest misfires that can be enjoyable in itself. (Killer shrubs?) Old , the writer-director’s latest, is probably the most boring movie he could make at this point: a perfectly fine, occasionally elegant, sometimes spooky but rarely ridiculous beach mystery for anyone who hasn’t binge-watched Lost lately. You won’t mind it, nor will you think you’re in the hands of a master, unless your idea of mastery is informed by certain supernatural episodes of Fantasy Island .

To that gorgeous beach (the Dominican Republic comes off better than most of the cast) a handful of vacationing families are shuttled, buttered up by their resort manager who promises a “once-in-a-lifetime experience”. Shyamalan is still doing that thing where he uses realistic adult problems to distract us from the fake stuff; this time it’s divorce, as a loveless husband and wife ( Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps , neither fully persuasive) yell at each other behind closed doors.

There’s a poetry to this idea, but Shyamalan rarely engages with the emotional underpinnings.

Marital difficulties have a way of fading, though, when it’s discovered that everyone on the beach — including lazier creations like a bratty trophy wife (Abbey Lee), an arrogant doctor (Rufus Sewell) and a rapper (Aaron Pierre) — is ageing at the rate of several months an hour. Plus, they can’t leave. There’s a poetry to this idea, the years wafting by like summer breezes. But Shyamalan rarely engages with the emotional underpinnings of the material (the source is a 2013 graphic novel, Sandcastle ). More often, he goes for shock payoffs: minutes after we see two children playing with plastic pails, they’ve become smitten teenagers walking hand in hand, a pregnant belly swelling alarmingly.

The plot gets bogged down in desperate escape attempts: swimming, free-solo climbing, underwater diving. Shyamalan’s camera is equally restless, whipping around the characters in a breathless run. It’s his best idea. Time waits for no-one, especially on this beach. (You may roll your eyes at the director’s inevitable cameo, during which he can be seen peering through a Hitchcock-sized zoom lens, an unnecessary flex.) The better actors, including Thomasin McKenzie and Alex Wolff , add a hint of dazed whiplash to their rushed adolescences.

Is there a twist? No director has ever saddled himself more with the phony heft of third-act surprises. You won’t read any spoilers here, but in making Old , Shyamalan, 50, seems at a midpoint. His new movie constantly threatens to be better than it is — deeper, more metaphysical, less beholden to gimmicks. Defiantly, it sticks to being about a haunted beach. And that’s okay. But someone should tell this filmmaker, so willing to waste time with elaborate contraptions, that the clock’s ticking.

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Old has no shortage of interesting ideas -- and writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's uneven execution will intrigue or annoy viewers, with little middle ground between.

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Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s ‘Old’ isn’t so bad, except when it’s terrible

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The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic . Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials .

Watching “Old” will take about four years off your life — or just under two hours, depending on which way you’re reading your trusty temporal-wormhole conversion chart. The movie, you see, follows a group of unfortunate vacationers who get stuck on a private beach, where they fall victim to an alarming, irreversible, inexplicable process of accelerated aging. Did I say inexplicable? How silly of me. This is a thriller written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan , after all, which means there’s always an explanation or two or 200. It’s a wonder he isn’t still explaining it as the credits roll.

By the time they do, you may find yourself both exasperated and tickled by what you’ve seen: a gleaming slab of high-end, high-concept summer trash that really does play strange games with your perceptions and maybe even your tastes. “Old” grabs you right away, starts losing you at the half-hour mark, pulls you back in with some agreeably bonkers set pieces, drags you through a tedious closing stretch and finally leaves you in an oddly charitable mood: Say, that wasn’t so bad, except when it was terrible. It’s no small accomplishment. Some Shyamalan films can take years to start looking better with age (see: “The Village,” or maybe don’t), but “Old” pulls it off in record time.

That’s a good thing, since the clock is already ticking for Prisca (Vicky Krieps) and Guy (Gael García Bernal), the attractive, unhappily married couple we see arriving at a tropical island resort in the opening scenes. They’re calling it quits and taking one last family vacation together with their kids, Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and Trent (Nolan River), who are 11 and 6, but not for long. Everyone’s too distracted to notice the faintly creepy vibes at the resort, one of those all-inclusive getaways with stunning ocean views, personalized cocktails on arrival and a van (driven by Shyamalan himself, in one of his more prominent signature on-screen roles) that will chauffeur specially hand-selected guests to a secret cove on another side of the island.

It’s here that Guy, Prisca and the kids find themselves one afternoon, along with several other guests. While they have names, it may be best to identify each of them by the occupation and/or single personality trait that Shyamalan has saddled them with: There’s a rude doctor (Rufus Sewell), his beauty-obsessed wife (Abbey Lee), their cute daughter (Kylie Begley) and her sweet grandmother (Kathleen Chalfant). There’s a soulful rapper (Aaron Pierre), a helpful nurse (Ken Leung) and his perhaps over-helpful psychiatrist wife (Nikki Amuka-Bird). And then there’s the corpse that washes up that afternoon, the first sign that something on this beach is very, very wrong.

More signs follow. A small tumor inflates to the size of a grapefruit within seconds. Digitally rendered wrinkles appear on the older travelers’ faces, while cuts and wounds heal with alarming rapidity. Maddox and Trent are suddenly recast with older actors (Thomasin McKenzie and Luca Faustino Rodriguez), like wee moppets suddenly morphing into angsty teens on “Days of Our Lives.” As you’d expect and perhaps even want from a slasher movie where Time itself is wielding the sickle, the body count escalates fast. They’ll all be dead within days or even hours, they realize, and whenever they try to leave — to exit through the surrounding caves or swim past the heavy currents — the beach has an unnerving way of yanking them back.

And “Old,” adapted from Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters’ graphic novel “Sandcastle,” is just getting started. How to describe the long, noisy, stabby, increasingly unhinged passages that follow? “Gilligan’s Island” as reimagined by Luis Buñuel? Ed Wood’s “L’Avventura”? “The Curious Case of Benjamin Beach Bum”? I’m spitballing here, and so, on some level, is Shyamalan. Burrowing into the outlandish biomedical implications of his premise, he pulls off one or two amusingly grisly sequences, at least one of which suggests that even premature aging has its undeniable uses. He steeps his characters in a familiar, quintessentially Shyamalanian fog of panic and paranoia, in which they struggle to believe, let alone explain, the extraordinary phenomena transpiring before their eyes.

What he doesn’t do is come close to generating so much as a flurry of real suspense or terror — a failing that can be chalked up to the surprising ineptitude of the filmmaking. This is dispiriting to report, given that Shyamalan’s undersung signature as a storyteller has always been his superior eye, his skill at patiently building tension and suspense inside the frame. Even when he loses his narrative way or gets bogged down in metaphysical portent, his visual command seldom abandons him.

Until now. Shyamalan seems weirdly at a loss for how to stage action in this confined yet open space, and his actors are often left standing around in stiff, awkward formations. (The fast-mutating ensemble also includes Embeth Davidtz, Emun Elliott, Alex Wolff, Eliza Scanlen and Mikaya Fisher.) The camera lurches around these sandy minimalist environs, whipping up flurries of psychodrama but never quite finding the ideal placement. The dialogue is even clumsier, all forehead-smacking exposition (“Our cells are aging very fast here!” “The dog’s dead!”) in a script that tends to tell twice as much as it shows. In trying to capture a group state of mental and physiological free fall, the filmmaker merely exposes the limits of his own control.

So why, in spite of all that, does “Old” still inspire a spasm of retroactive goodwill? Maybe because after the murky, misbegotten “Glass,” it’s nice to see Shyamalan doing a deranged one-off, taking the movie equivalent of an invigorating stroll in the sun. Maybe because the story concludes not with a shocking, credulity-straining twist, but rather an explanation that, in light of all that has preceded it, feels curiously coherent, even intuitive. Maybe because of the wondrous Vicky Krieps, whose lovely, breathy understatement finds expressive notes that few of her co-stars can match. (Look out for her in the upcoming “Bergman Island,” a vastly superior movie about an estranged couple on an island where reality begins to blur.)

Or maybe it’s just that “Old,” a story of collective bodily breakdown arriving in the midst of a pandemic, builds to an obvious but appreciably stirring note. It acknowledges the reality of just how quickly time passes and how cruelly loved ones can be ripped away. Maybe it’s true that life is too short for bad movies. Or maybe it’s too short not to take what pleasure in them you can.

Rating: PG-13, for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language Running time: 1 hour, 48 minutes Playing: Opens July 23 in general release

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Old (United States, 2021)

Sometimes the worst thing that can happen to a filmmaker is to have an unexpected breakthrough success at a young age. M. Night Shyamalan isn’t the first director to have spent the bulk of a career trying to recapture something of the success he found with an early movie. And, although some of his films have found a modicum of acceptance in their own right, his name has become inextricably entwined with The Sixth Sense . No matter how far he strays from that film’s premise, the reputation of the overrated ghost story overshadows everything with the “Shyamalan” name attached.

Old finds the director playing in Twilight Zone arena. However, while it’s not hard to envision how the ideas in the movie could result in something compelling, the execution is lacking. The production is hampered by awkward moments, inexplicable lapses, absurd dialogue, and stilted acting. Although the location (a tropical paradise) is evocative, the movie trudges along with characters we don’t care about and circumstances that are less interesting than they should be. In fact, the backstory – which is given perfunctory screen time at the beginning and in a few wordy, expository scenes near the end – is more intriguing than the stories of the various characters at Old ’s center.

As a B-movie throwaway, Old offers a few shallow pleasures, although the roads not taken offer potentially richer experiences than the predictable pathway traversed by Shyamalan’s screenplay (adapted from the graphic novel “Sandcastle”). Late in the proceedings, the movie addresses the question of bio-ethics during an expository sequence (to paraphrase Star Trek , “Should the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many?”), but the film doesn’t do much beyond raise the question. Including this scene is an attempt to elevate Old above the level at which most of the movie exists, but it doesn’t work.

Guy (Gael Garcia Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) are on the island for a final vacation before a divorce. With them are their two children, 11-year old Maddox (Alexa Swinton) and 6-year old Trent (Nolan River). Charles (Rufus Sewell), the head doctor at a hospital, and his trophy wife, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), are there with their young daughter, Kara, and his elderly mother, Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Also on the beach are Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) and her husband, Jarin (Ken Leung), and rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). While the aging isn’t immediately apparent with the adults, it is quickly evident with the children – after a few hours, Maddox (Thomasin McKenzie), has noticeably more curves and Trent (Alex Wolff) and filled out. As he and Kara (Eliza Scanlen) enter late adolescence, they begin to explore their sexuality.

Interpersonal interactions reveal tensions. Although Guy and Prisca’s relationship strengthens during their period on the beach, Charles and Chrystal’s disintegrates. When a dead body is discovered, Charles points the finger of blame at the reclusive Mid-Sized Sedan. The doctor also shows early signs of a personality disorder and paranoia. The teenage relationship that develops between Trent and Kara creates new difficulties as neither is emotionally or intellectually able to cope with the rapid changes to their bodies. As the clock ticks away their youth and vitality, the vacationers become increasingly desperate in their struggles to find a way of escape.

Because this is supposed to be a horror film, a few requisite grisly sequences are included, although one of them borders on horror/comedy. The PG-13 rating noticeably hamstrings Shyamalan, who employs distracting camera tricks to avoid showing nipples or too much blood. Plot holes abound, many of which don’t require post-screening reflection to identify. The movie doesn’t make a lot of sense and it doesn’t help that the dialogue is poorly written and clumsily delivered.

For a few years back in the 2000s, the Shyamalan brand meant something. Now, with so many years since the director has made something worth watching, it’s perhaps time to admit that the well has run dry. Old is as wrinkled and decrepit as the title makes it sound.

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• User Reviews
• The premise feels very familiar (desert island beach; time slips; weird things happening.... "Lost" anyone?). But as a shell for a big-screen adventure it kept me well-engaged.
• Shyamalan and his "Glass" cinematographer Mike Gioulakis use some novel techniques to portray the ageing effects. The angles used feel quite Hitchcockian at times. Shyamalan supports this with the sound design, which makes this a REALLY good movie to watch in a cinema with good surround sound. Often the camera will be spinning showing nothing but ocean or rocks, with the character's conversation rotating behind you in the cinema. It's really quite effective.
• Shyamalan knows that no visual effects can improve on the horrors your mind can come up with. Although a '15' certificate, the "sustained threat, strong violence and injury detail" referenced by the BBFC pales into insignificance (in terms of what you actually see) compared to the equally rated "Freaky".
• I've seen other reviews comment that the "twist" (no spoilers here) was obvious. But, although not a ground-breaking idea, I was sufficiently satisfied with the denouement. It made sense, albeit twisted sense.
• I enjoyed the movie's leisurely set-up, introducing the characters and the movie's concept. (In many ways, it felt like the start of one of Irwin Allen's disaster movies of the 70's and 80's). But then Shyamalan turns the dial up to 11 and the action becomes increasingly farcical. Add into that the fact that you can see some of the 'jolts' coming a mile off, and the movie becomes progressively more disappointing, with a high ERQ (eye-rolling quotient) by the end.
• In particular, there are inconsistencies to the story that get you asking uncomfortable questions. For example, wounds can heal in the blink of an eye.... but not stab wounds apparently.
• The cast is truly global in nature: Vicky ("Phantom Thread") Krieps hails from Luxembourg; Bernal is Mexican; Sewell is a Brit; Amuka-Bird ("David Copperfield") is Nigerian; Leung is American; Eliza Scanlan is an Aussie; and Thomasin McKenzie (so good in "Jojo Rabbit", and good here too) is a Kiwi. But although it's clearly quite natural that an exotic beach resort would attract guests from all over the world, the combination of accents here makes the whole thing unfortunately sound like a dodgy spaghetti western!

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Old (2021) Review

Some minor potential spoilers ahead.

What worked: overall a solid Twilight Zone like premise that’s explored in several creative ways. There’s a mystery to be solved, but it’s not over-reliant on the “big twist”. The movie’s definitely more interested in the ramifications and wrinkles inherit in the premise, so the “why” is just a nice bit of icing and not the main course. The pacing is brisk, moving from one set piece to another — it never drags. Seemingly little moments and details come into play later on, there’s little wasted fat. There’s also a few funny moments and lines. The scene in the cave with the lady with the bone disease is straight up Junji Ito level nightmare fuel and I’m sure will be most people’s standout scene.

What Didn’t Work: I thought they really could have played up the aging makeup and effects. The adults barely seemed to age at all, even when they were supposed to be near death. I would have loved to see some true body horror with severe, top level aging makeup. Really felt like a missed opportunity. You could feel the low budget several times, with some effects that felt cheap, like the skin healing CGI and the girl clinging to the cliff. Also the pacing was brisk, which was for the most part good, but in some scenes it felt almost too brisk, like they were cramming three scenes worth of development into a single shot.

Overall I enjoyed it. It was a fun premise explored nicely. With some ratcheting up of the makeup and body horror it could have been a real classic. As it stands it’s like a satisfying episode of Twilight Zone, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

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