#old 2021

Cretaceous Cove: Old (2021)

Old (2021) - M. Night Shymalan

Rating PG-13

Crow rating - 2/10 🏹- 2/10 🪲- 2/10 (average 2/10)

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Spoiler free review -

I think the movie was uniquely terrible. I wouldn’t say necessarily it’s not worth the watch however I would only watch it for free. (Free on Peacock…) I wouldn’t let my 13 year old brother watch this movie - not particularly because it is scary but there are moments where body horror collides with fetish content aggressively. Certainly earns the thriller title and leaves the horror aspect in the dust. I think that for a movie under 2 hours it filled the awkward space between dinner and bed acceptably. It honestly felt like a creepy pasta that got made into a movie.

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Spoiler Review:

I was not overly found of the cast we were given to play with. The main 4 felt very one dimensional most of the time (to be honest all of the female characters lacked much human characteristics and depth beyond one defining feature).

Guy Cappa was certainly there for much of the movie. To be honest all of his roles could have been interchanged with another characters and it would have had no affect on the film.

Prisca Cappa seemed initially to be an independent science minded woman who was battling with chronic illness… after her character depth was explored she was a slightly conceded stereotypical mother who was leaving her husband and children for another man because she was on a doom spiral about a potentially benign tumor in her abdomen.

Maddox Cappa was the sister to Trent Cappa. She was dangerously underdeveloped as a character despite being 1/2 of the island goers that made it to the end.

Trent Cappa was an autistic coded boy who is the main protagonist. His knowledge and maturity level is dubious throughout the film as at times he behaves like a young adult than will quickly snap into 6 year old mode. His knowledge level is also dubious throughout the film as he is see to wield random facts and “adult themes” yet know nothing about other things.

Mid- sized sedan was my favorite character. He was the most charasmatic to me and besides the odd tension they placed at points between him and Maddox I enjoyed him. The tension present between him and Charles was palpable. I think one of the biggest flaws in the movie came from mid sized sedan however - he went to the beach with a girl who had MS and after she went nude swimming and disappeared he waited until mid morning to truly look for her. Despite the fact that every half hour was 1 year and he had been there since late in the night (assumably 2AM -> 10(ish) AM when the other vacationers arrived - so roughly 16 “years” or so) he was still recognizable by Maddox as midsized sedan. He aged essentially none while there which was attributed to the fact of him being black in a one off joke between him and Patricia. He was also attributed as having a clotting disorder despite having a bloody nose for hours which assumably would have healed immediately much like all of the other wounds gotten in the film.

Charles (the doctor) - racist doctor with dementia who had a significantly younger than him wife and a young daughter. He was one of the most hard tried horror elements and the one that fell flat the hardest. 🪲 is a nurse who specializes in geriatric care (they interact with almost exclusively patients with dementia on a day to day basis). They found his dementia process to be a gross mischaracterization of the disease and to be surface level researched at best.

Crystal - vein blond woman with a calcium deficiency who is a shitty mother and wife- that’s it… her death (rocking around in a cave where she literally breaks both of her arms and both of her legs because she was “too ugly” to be seen) was uhh… really silly… I mean seriously… she bumped into a wall and shattered her arm… than leaned in her hand and broke it. Than writhed like a worm until she broke herself to pieces….

Kara was a disgusting story line - she was raised by Crystal and unknowingly had sex with Trent, became rapidly pregnant, lost the baby, and died via falling off a cliff… (more to come about this)

Charle’s mother (+obligatory small rich lady dog) were completely irrelevant to the plot. They needed to fill the animal death quota of the story I guess. She held so little significance that I genuinely forgot she was ever there multiple times throughout the story.

Jarin and Patricia - Jarin is the equivalent of tossing in a DMPC when you’ve given up on the PC being able to figure out the shape puzzle. He gave valuable insight about the area than died immediately after his use was spent. Patricia was an epileptic psychologist … that’s it… she had seizures… gave surface level psychological facts, than died of a seizure…

To be transparent last night was the second time I had watched this film. The first time, I was still in high school and had pirated Old after it first came out. After I watched it I remember feeling a gross kind of discomfort. At the time I chalked it up to being affective horror that maybe I was susceptible to. However, as an adult with a fully functioning brain I think the feeling that I associate with this movie is the sensation of accidentally stumbling into porn as a kid.

I want to be very clear that the pregnancy scene felt pedophilic. The young children had been rapidly aged and layed next to each other in the towel fort Kara had made with her deceased grandmother. The scene in retrospect is disturbing greatly because Trent and Kara obviously had the mind of children still and spoke as young kids do, the screen panned back to the adults on the other side of the beach, than suddenly Kara and Trent are walking towards their parents, hand in hand, and Kara is grotesquely pregnant. Jarin claims she is around 5 months: however, her stomach droops low, linea nigra and all, as she realistically looks near birthing. Something is so uncomfortably visceral about a six year old naively comforting her mother that she had simply “gotten fat” while her stomach bulges and swells. The kids seemingly didn’t know they had sex… Kara was than laid on the beach, belly protruding, as everyone gathered around her to birth the baby…

There was no reason to have a child impregnated and birthing. The poor foreshadowing of this provided by Prisca’s tumor removal did not justify this even slightly. There were three married couples, a stereotypical bimbo character, and an “outsider” who were all adults and yet they chose the children to partake in the only sexual acts of the film… nasty as fuck.