M Night Shyamalan is the Jonah of contemporary mainstream filmmakers. Like the bible’s long-suffering fall guy, Shyamalan initially seemed chosen by God when a string of canny sci-fi hits propelled him to success in the early 2000s. The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable and Signs earned money and critical acclaim, and for a brief period he was Hollywood’s golden boy, the new Spielberg, the next Hitchcock.
But bad luck, and a string of flops, then cast Shyamalan into the outer darkness, the apogee being the unfortunately titled 2010 fantasy Last Airbender, a film so bad it seemed to sink the poor man entirely. He became, for a time, a studio pariah, a kind of blockbuster Typhoid Mary whose mere involvement in a project was enough to doom it to failure.
But Shyamalan has always had a spark of originality, and even his worst films are never dull. In the mid-2010s, he began to make a comeback, beginning with the hilarious found footage comic horror After Earth. With Split (2016) and Glass (2019), he colourfully completed the dark superhero trilogy he’d begun in 2002 with Unbreakable. And now comes Old, a nightmarish horror replete with Shyamalan’s trademark ickiness.
Nothing ickier than instant ageing. When I was a kid, I was traumatised by watching the 1960s British horror She on the television. Swiss actress Ursula Andress, at that point the sine qua non of feminine allure for pre-adolescents, played a 2,000-year-old desert warrior queen known by her phalanx of flunkies as ‘she who must be obeyed’.
All is imperious splendour until she steps for a second time into the sacred flame that had made her immortal in the first place. In a matter of seconds the divine Ursula shrinks to a wizened shell, and crumbles to dust. There was mortality, all sped up: I didn’t sleep for a month, and similar unpleasantness awaits the protagonists in Old.
Nolan River as six-year-old Trent, who also ages rapidly
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Nolan River as six-year-old Trent, who also ages rapidly
They would be Guy and Prissa (Gael Garcia Bernal, Vicky Krieps), a youngish couple who arrive for a weekend vacation at an idyllic Caribbean resort with their two children, Trent (6) and Maddox (11). The kids are excited and binge on ice cream and candy in the hotel’s plush foyer, but all is not well with their parents. Come sundown, they bicker: for reasons she has not specified, Prissa is about to leave Guy, and also chooses this moment to reveal that she has a benign tumour in her abdomen which will have to be removed. Happy days, then.
Things look up when the hotel’s oily manager tells them about a secret, private beach only accessible to chosen residents: the family has been chosen, and boards a minibus along with a nervy heart surgeon called Charles (Rufus Sewell), his neurotic trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), their six-year-old daughter, and Charles’ elderly mother.
A male nurse and his psychologist wife make up the party, and all are delighted when they walk through a jungle clearing onto the most beautiful beach you’ve ever laid eyes on.
A languid day of sun, sea and sand awaits, but on the foreshore lurks our story’s Banquo. As identified by Maddox, Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) is a famous rapper who’s come to the Caribbean for some down time.
But it’s not going well: he stands stonily, staring at the ocean, and when the body of a young woman then presents itself, he explains she’d been with him and gone for a swim.
Charles, an excitable soul, is instantly convinced that the black man did it, and starts swishing at Sedan with a pocket knife.
But their problems are only beginning, for it quickly becomes apparent that everyone is ageing fast: Maddox and Trent (played as juveniles by Alex Woolf and Thomasin McKenzie) are now teenagers, young Kara has grown with them and, after a game of hide and seek with Trent gets frisky, she walks up the beach pregnant!
All the adults, meanwhile, are rapidly deteriorating, going blind, deaf, popping off, turning mad, and there seems no way of escaping this existential nightmare.
Old, in summary, might sound stupid, but Shyamalan is on top of his game here, using stock characters to explore entitlement, prejudice, vanity, jealously, and all the other charming congenital failings that scupper our ongoing attempts to be happy, and decent.
The human condition itself is dusted off for our inspection and, without the faintest hint of sentimentality, Shyamalan highlights the little things that keep us sane and make our brief lives bearable: love, humour, kindness, the bonds of family.
The director appears himself, playing a shifty hotel driver who looks rather pleased with himself.
He ought to, because in Old, Shyamalan is pumping on all cylinders: it’s as good a film as he’s made.
****
I Never Cry
(No Cert, IFI, 98mins)
Up-and-coming actress Zofia Stafiej is responsible for all the memorable moments in this sombre little drama filmed mainly in Dublin. She is Olka, a belligerent young Polish teen who is not entirely happy with her lot.
She lives in a cramped flat with her harried mother and severely disabled brother, her job at a car rental shop is unfulfilling, and in an amusing opening scene she fluffs her driving test by getting into a fist fight with another motorist.
Olka has spirit, potential, and a yearning for international travel: she’s about to be granted that wish, but not in the manner she imagined. When the family hears that Olka’s absent father has died in a work accident in Dublin, her mother dispatches her to repatriate his remains. When she gets to Ireland, Olka hasn’t seen the man for so long she has difficulty identifying his body, but the more she finds out about his hard life, the less inclined she is to be dismissive.
With her huge eyes and charismatic scowl, Zofia Stafiej is a star in the making, and Piotr Domalewski’s film paints a grim picture of the plight of the migrant worker.
***
Riders of Justice
(16, 116mins)
Most revenge movies play to our basest instincts, but Anders Thomas Jensen’s witty thriller has an altogether more complex agenda. Danish soldier Marcus (Mads Mikkelsen) is on active service in Afghanistan when he finds out his wife has been killed in a freak train collision. His daughter Mathilde (Andrea Heick Gadeberg) wants to grieve, but Marcus is a gravel-hard military man who dismisses all talk of therapy and instead seizes on the first opportunity for revenge.
That comes from three bickering wonks who are convinced the accident was caused by a motorbike gang, the Riders of Justice, who wanted to kill a witness aboard the train who was about to testify against them. This theory is enough to spur Marcus to deadly action, but he’s a mad dog, and increasingly uncontrollable.
An exploration of male rage, and the psychological scars that impede us all, Riders of Justice manages to be simultaneously moving and hilarious, the comedy coming from the three stooges, who form a kind of mad Greek chorus, and Mikkelsen is wonderful in an unusual role.
