Old review round-up: M Night Shyamalan's thriller is 'brilliantly poised between serious and silly'

M Night Shyamalan’s Universal thriller, Old features Gael Garcia Bernal, Rufus Sewell, Nolan River, Embeth Davidtz, Emun Elliott, Eliza Scanlen, Thomasin McKenzie, Aaron Pierre, Alex Wolff, Vicky Krieps, Abbey Lee, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Ken Leung. Scripted by Shyamalan himself, Old has been backed by Ashwin Rajan for Blinding Edge Pictures and Marc Bienstock. Steven Schneider is attached as executive producer. Here’s a review round-up of Old The Guardian: With a cast worthy of Agatha Christie, this tale of a resort where time has been terrifyingly accelerated is brilliantly poised between serious and silly. Collider: Old is a good reminder that even when Shyamalan is infuriating, he’s almost always captivating. Even when his screenwriting choices are questionable as they are here, I can’t deny that Old had me hooked even at its silliest, dumbest moments. Empire: A Twilight Zone–worthy premise, subtly sold by ace make-up effects, makes for a decent-enough thriller, intriguing in the moment but ultimately too timid to say anything meaningful about ageing. IndieWire: Old insists that trying to flip the hourglasses of our lives is a futile waste of the brief time we get in this world, and there’s something vaguely poignant about watching these characters make peace with that idea and/or die trying. But the emotional undertow of Shyamalan’s story feels grafted onto a film that scurries from one supernatural nightmare to the next so fast that none of them feel rooted in a place of shared reality. Deadline: Like all of Shyamalan’s work you will either go with it or you won’t. I don’t expect this one to age very well, and some of it is just laughably bad. At the very least, as a summertime theatrical release, the stunning location (it was shot at Playa El Valle in the Dominican Republic ) should give audiences a nice respite from the heat.