Few genre filmmakers have earned such wild swings in fan reactions as M. Night Shyamalan, with even his most devout fans being able to acknowledge that he has made a number of unexpected missteps with various projects. Films like The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, and Signs earned him immense praise early on, while efforts like The Lady in the Water, The Happening, and The Last Airbender saw him lose favor among general audiences and fanatics at large. Even following those disappointing efforts, films like The Visit and Split proved he still had a number of compelling ideas. His latest outing, Old, thrusts viewers back into the abyss of experiences that are both tonally and narratively uneven and inconsistent, demonstrating yet again that while his direction and staging of unsettling sequences are almost unmatched, the scares don’t matter if the script is too absurd.
