Directed by M. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense; The Last Airbender; Signs; Split; The Village) and starring Gael García Bernal (Babel; The Accused; The Motorcycle Diaries; Bad Education; Mozart in the Jungle (TV Series)), Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread; The Colony; Hanna; Bergman Island; The Girl in the Spider's Web), Rufus Sewell (Hercules; Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter; The Tourist; The Illusionist; The Man in the High Castle (TV Series)) and
Nikki Amuka-Bird (The Personal History of David Copperfield; The Children Act; Jupiter Ascending).
Thriller; 108 mins
More on the side of a horror film, rather than a pure thriller, Old follows a family on a dream holiday which soon finds them on a secluded beach along with a couple of other families, but which quickly turns into a holiday from hell.
Guy (Gael García Berna) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), together with their children, quickly discover that something related to the beach is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day. However, as the cells in their hair and nails are technically dead, they do not grow at the same rate as the live cells in the bodies.
Guy and Prisca are there partly because one of them is ill, and others on the beach appear to have different health issues, with Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) suffering from epileptic fits and Charles (Rufus Sewell), a surgeon, displaying erratic behaviour.
As they age, death occurs and the survivors try to leave but find they way blocked: they cannot return the way they came, so they try to swim and climb the cliff-face, but eventually they become resigned to their fate.
While the storyline, which focuses on ageing and death, in particular the second half of the film, is very cleverly done, sadly the acting - or possibly the editing, sometimes it's difficult to say which - in the first half feels not to be at the level one would normally associate with films by the acclaimed director M. Night Shyamalan.
Currently being screened at Kinepoli
