Bonus – Old
Leigh and Tim talk Old, M Night Shyamalan's latest project about a group of holidaymakers stranded on a beach that makes them age rapidly. It's an interesting premise, featuring an international cast that includes Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Alex Wolff, Thomasin McKenzie and Australia's own Eliza Scanlen, but is the thriller worth your time? Dive into this bite-sized episode to find out.
Find an edited extract of this episode below. You can listen to the full episode above and follow Popcorn Podcast on your preferred podcast platform for more
OLD MOVIE REVIEW
Leigh: Maybe you can shed some light on this with your perspective, Tim, but the biggest issue for me was that the dialogue in Old was so stilted and unnatural, and I did not understand why. Was it a style choice? Was it the performances? I don't think it’s the performances. I think it's the material.
Tim: Yes. It's kind of how Night writes his dialogue, though. It’s not particularly inspired. So, if you were to go back to, not to every film, but some of it's just really, really painful. Everyone in this movie was constantly sharing unsolicited facts about themselves, for what reason? What purpose?
Leigh: For some reason we needed to know what everyone did for a living? I mean, it was a cute character trait of Trent’s, the young boy. He would go up to people and ask them what they did for a living. But it was so overt, that I thought, ‘This has got to come back around at some point’ and I kept waiting for it to come back around. Then on the beach, again, people kept randomly bringing up what they did for a living when it had no bearing on what they were talking about. It didn't go anywhere.
Tim: It was almost like a contagious thing.
Leigh: There is so much foreshadowing going on, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it was very hit-you-over-the-head with it. I wondered if it was all part of Night’s style of misdirection. I kept going, ‘No, there's got to be a reason for this!’ Like, look here, and I'll surprise you there later on. But it was just so overt. There was a line the mother says to her young daughter as they're going to the beach: “I can't wait to hear your voice when you're older” – what an unnatural thing to say to someone when they’re singing.
Tim: Yes, that is such a good line to pull out. I've got a note here saying: ‘People do not communicate with each other how he's written they communicate with each other.’ It's not normal discourse that a mother and a daughter would have, and it was so jarring and unnatural and weird. You asked could it have been a misdirection device? No.
