M. Night Shyamalan's new horror movie Old is dividing critics. Some reviewers have praised its off-the-wall weirdness and intriguing story premise, while others were put off by the odd dialogue and struggled to get invested in the characters.
After the breakout success of his third feature film, The Sixth Sense, Shyamalan's career as a filmmaker has been full of highs, lows, twists and turns. Following a string of critical and box office flops that included The Last Airbender and After Earth, Shyamalan began self-financing his movies and made a comeback with found footage thriller The Visit. He scored another win with the horror movie Split, which was widely well-reviewed grossed $278 million worldwide, far outstripping its $9 million production budget.
Old has a strong story hook: a family staying at a luxuy resort take a day trip to a hidden beach on the other side of the island, along with a group of other guests. After finding a dead body in the water, they realize that something on the beach is causing extremely accelerated ageing. With seemingly no way off the beach and a rapidly ticking clock on their remaining lifespans, the family must find a way to escape before they die of old age. Old has been compared both favorably and unfavorably to the strangeness and goofiness of Shyamalan's 2008 movie The Happening, and has received both rave reviews and one-star tear-downs. As of the time of writing, it holds an almost perfectly even score of 52% on Rotten Tomatoes. Here's what some of the negative reviews of Old said about the movie.
ABC:
"What shocked me is how thinly Shyamalan develops characters and how clumsily he handles potent themes about sudden death and the collapse of time that should resonate powerfully in the COVID-19 era. Even his argument for family values in the face of global youth worship feels rote."
"For many reasons, none of them good, Old is in a class by itself. M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller-slasher-sci-fi-creep-out is peerlessly clumsy, silly and alarmed. It’s also alarming for its ineptitude... [The cast] would be a significant draw in other circumstances, but the beach's malign power extends to turning excellent actors into wooden performers."
"What’s extraordinary is how the daft dialogue infects the talented cast. [Gael García] Bernal, [Vicky] Krieps, [Rufus] Sewell; we know these people can act. But, for whole chunks of the movie, they frown and wave their arms around like am-dram rubes... Shyamalan’s film wants us to live in the moment. Too many of the moments in this movie are moronic."
"The editing is uneven, making one wonder whether there was originally a much longer cut that got trimmed down during post-production. Character development is largely ineffective with most of the people acting in odd, irrational ways to satisfy plot needs... 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."
Even some the positive reviews of Old largely agree with the point that the dialogue is strange and awkward, which in turn hampers some of the actors' performances. (though Alex Wolff's portrayal of a six year-old boy in the body of an adult has been praised as a highlight). Unlike the source material that the movie is based on, a graphic novel called Sandcastle, Old comes up with an explanation for why the beach ages people and arguably falls into the trap of over-explaining the time mechanics at work. Nonetheless, many reviewers were charmed by Old's chaotic weirdness and felt that on balance its positives outweighed the negatives. Here's a selection of quotes from Old's more favorable reviews.
"Old is good. It’s very good... Shyamalan teases out new information in just the right doses, remembering all the while that this is, at its core, a B-picture. It isn’t gory, but it’s gross, and the camera knows just how much to show to keep us dialed in."
IGN:
M. Night Shyamalan's Old, which tackles the distinct horrors of aging, ends up being a fascinating entry to the director's spotty career. It may not be his greatest work, but it is one that uses an intriguing premise to tackle profound ideas."
"Shyamalan has created a splendid throwback of a science-fiction thriller that develops a simple idea with stark vigor and conveys the straight-faced glee of realizing the straightforward logic of its enticing absurdity."
"Yes, Old has plenty of the clunky dialogue that defines Shyamalan’s work... It probably runs 10 minutes too long, with an ending that works too hard to lay out the silly reasoning behind the beach’s supernatural properties. None of that matters. The central conceit of Old has so much juice, and Shyamalan gets to explore so many fun—if sadistic—avenues over the course of one very long day. It’s his most ambitious work in years, wrapped in the delightful, tawdry packaging of a pulpy thriller."