Official Trailer:

We all are familiar with Time Travel paradox where one of the twins travels to a distance star at the speed of light and when he returns his twin brother has aged more than him. Time and ageing are an interesting premise to play around with and the writers are limited only by their imagination. In the hands of good directors, what is on paper gets staged beautifully into movies. Pretty much all kinds of genres, drama, action, thriller, horror have used the concepts of time travel, time loop, and predestination. In Time Machine and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade we saw the bad guys ageing too fast decomposing into ashes. In Time the challenge is to get enough time credits to stay young and live longer.

In Old, Manoj Night Shyamalan (MNS), reimagines the time and ageing concept in his trademark style, going for the primal, inner fear of humans. The segments of the movie that works best are the ones when MNS plays around with the passage of time and toys and tosses us around with our fears and angst on getting old, like how scary and surreal it is to see your kids growing up too fast in matter of few hours or a newly born baby decomposes in to dust.

Old sets up the premise beautifully. Initial dialogues fit in with the premise of the movie, mom mentions how she can’t wait to hear her daughter’s singing voice when she grows up, her reply to her restless son let’s all slow down a little, there is a mention of last trip – could be due to divorce or medical condition. Few of the visitors to the resort are chosen to spend their time in a special place, a secluded beach hidden behind a cliff. When we see the secret location, it is so beautiful, breathtaking, and choice of shots and sound design helps us to grasp the beauty of the ocean, mountain, the colors, and the roar of waves. Beneath all that beauty of the beach, weird things start to happen around them. A dead body wash ashore. Within few hours it decomposes into dust. They realize the beach is rapidly ageing them and they age by 2 years every hour. They need to plot their escape with little time left. Children rapidly turn into teenagers with no lived experiences and Agnes dies. One member of each family has a medical condition. Prisca’s stomach tumor grows fast, and Charles has to perform a surgery to remove it. In the meantime, Kara gets pregnant, delivers a baby but the baby dies not able to survive the time that is in a fast-forward mode. Charles schizophrenia worsens and Chrystal’s bones ruptures due to her medical condition. When they realize there is no way out, their thoughts shift to relationship, marriage, regrets, and forgiveness.

MNS goes in for interesting choice of shots for the segment in the island. Straightaway we are not shown the grown-up kids; we see the reaction in others, or we get to view only a slice of their figure with someone blocking our view.  Ground level looking up camera angle when we see the decomposing dead body. Check out the sequence how Kara’s pregnancy gets revealed. MNS has picked few of the right traits of ageing that strokes our inner fears with getting old. It forces to contemplate the question what we would if we have only few hours left – “have we said the important things to the ones we love before it is too late”. Performances of the actors fits in with the premise – make sense of what is going on with less time left.

So long as the story stays in the beach it is scary, surreal, and makes one uncomfortable. What lets down the movie is the climax. Explanation comes across as rushed and leaves more gaps than giving answers. Movie would have worked better without the explanatory segment. Rather leave the audience with ambiguity. As a super-natural thriller Old would have made us to contemplate ageing, relationships, love, marriage, regrets, and what is really important.