“Out with the old” is a sentiment that I’ve spent years battling over in a moral, holy war in my online spaces, but not over how the expression is usually meant. I’m not fighting for regress or conservatism, I’m fighting for the continuation of criticism, for the flourishment of film cultures, for the advancement of art. “In with the old,” I say, in with M. Night Shyamalan’s Masterpiece, Old (2021). 

Old, like practically all of Shyamalan’s films after The Village, is popularly and critically dismissed, due to Shyamalan’s unwarranted and prevailing infamy, a fact made obvious by their respected monotypically plot-based, and easily-shoaled criticism. For example, “The rapper kid in The Visit is unbearable!”, “Yeah, he’s obviously supposed to be!”; or “The Last Airbender is a horrible adaptation!”, “Well, it’s a baby show for babies, so shut up, millennial!”; or, “Split is a harmful portrayal of a real mental health disorder!”, “Yeah, that’s actually true.” 

Online, in pop-criticism conversations and on sites like Letterboxd, where the film holds a 2.4/5 average rating, Old’s primary critique is “unrealistic dialogue,” in spite of being a film about a beach that makes you old. And offline — because like almost every one of his other films, Old did very well at the box office — most of the criticisms, still, concern “unrealistic dialogue,” in spite of being a film about a beach that makes you old. 

I think to some, in these popular conversations online and offline, my defense of Old and films similar to it, may come off as abjectly contrarian, or pretentious, but I feel overwhelmingly that it’s purely out of what, to me, is the most meaningful experience one could have with a piece of art that isn’t their own, using it to see the progression of another artist. 

Old is Shyamalan’s 14th film, and it would be impossibly stupid for one to think that he hadn’t picked up or gotten better at a few things in his artistic process. Kidding, but like anyone else who’s fallen down the auteur theory rabbit-trench, my first approach to reading a piece of art is by finding its relativity in the body of work, which demands a great deal of extra work, but in my experience, the meaning brought by having an optimistic approach to every artist is the only way this deal is made great. I love Shyamalan’s films and it is for this reason and by this reason that I want to share my meaning — and, hopefully, imbue the dialogue. 

To me, Shyamalan’s films are most interesting for two reasons. First, Shyamalan’s films almost always center familial themes — even more than the horror films he’s known for. The early films closely explore relationships between obsessive, inquisitive young children and their parental/mentor figures, and as his art developed these relationships began to be examined with bigger scope against their societal reciprocities, the macro nature of which provides far less security than the child/parental figure micro. 

One of the more extreme examples of this is in The Village, an ensemble film whose elder players knowingly keep the younger away from the truth: they’re all living isolated and 200 years behind the rest of America, to conserve innocence and morality from the evils of the outside world. This conflict is empathetically portrayed in its climactic testing: the Village founder’s blind daughter’s fiance is stabbed, so he reveals to her the truth and sends her to get medicine from the outside world, something that could only be done by someone with unwavering, (literally) blind faith, for love. 

The second consistency across Shyamalan’s filmography is the cameos he makes, often placing himself in narratively significant roles that range from full-fledged ensemble players to small deus-ex machinas. In the Lady in the Water, Shyamalan plays Vick Ran, a writer, who is told by the titular Lady in the Water, Story — a creature from a different world on a mission to share her special insight about the future — that he’s the one bound to produce a work of writing that saves humanity. 

Now, Ran is foiled by another writer, a film critic… but when the film critic’s conventional views on storytelling are used to try and get (the) Story home, they seem to be cosmologically, innately incorrect and inhibiting, and only after the film critic is killed can outside-his-box thinking be used, and actually get (the) Story home. 

In Old, M. Night Shyamalan’s cameo-character literally drives the characters to the setting of the film. We don’t see him again until the very end, when he’s re-revealed to be literally finishing filming them from the clifftops. After this, it’s revealed that his film is being used in a report, part of an experiment being conducted by mad-scientists, who identify families with hereditary illnesses, lure them to a resort, and feed them food with research medicine that’s then tried when the test-subjects age to their ailments on the beach. 

On first watch, a lot of people find the twist so jarring that it totally turns them away. There’s a suddenness to it — an actual cut from the highest-staked scene in the film — and then the film runs another 8 minutes or so, taking a seemingly political bend about the ethics of human-testing. 

But a second watch, working backwards with the Old rather than the New; Shyamalan’s insert drives the characters to his metadiegetic film where they’ll experience all the existential and familial horror in the rest of their lives together, like his real films, together, that he spends his life for, which transitively gives that the intensity and high stakes of Old are to reflect his meaning of life — making movies. 

And to keep working backwards, as everything is as beautiful as it is intense: the cinematography is sweeping and the editing is dynamic throughout; the scenes of real horror shot with as much as the scenes where the kids run around on the beach playing. The quiet bits are as engaging as the fastest; the fantasy of a beach turning you old is as fantastical as its mad-scientists and the badass blockbuster helicopter the film ends on; and the dialogue’s perfectly precise exposition becomes comic in the way it teases and misleads.