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A family heads to a secluded beach vacation. They speak vaguely of the passage of time in a way that parents often do with their children, as mom mentions how she can’t wait to hear her daughter’s singing voice when she grows up. Shortly thereafter, it’s revealed that mom may not be able to do that because she has a tumor and this could be a "last trip," either because of her physical health or the health of her crumbling marriage. The passage of time changes at different points in your life, but especially when you see your kids growing up too fast and when you worry you might not be able to witness the bulk of their journey. When M. Night Shyamalan’s “Old,” based on the book by Pierre-Oscar Lévy and Frederick Peeters, is playing thematically with those feelings and allowing itself to be surreal and scary in the process, it truly works. When it feels like it has to nail down specifics, such as in a disappointing final stretch, it crosses that median line into the silly lane. The mysteries of aging are something everyone considers—“Old” taps into those considerations with just enough style to engage before stepping back from its own edge.

The family in the opening scene consists of Guy ( Gael García Bernal ), Prisca ( Vicky Krieps ), Trent ( Nolan River ) and Maddox ( Alexa Swinton ). The resort manager tells them about a secluded beach where they can avoid the touristy crowds, and they’re taken there by none other than Shyamalan himself in maybe his most meta cameo (after all, he’s the director, assembling all of his players on the sandy stage). Guy and Prisca’s clan isn’t alone. They’re joined by a doctor named Charles ( Rufus Sewell ), his wife Chrystal ( Abbey Lee ), his mother Agnes ( Kathleen Chalfant ) and his daughter Kara ( Mikaya Fisher ). A third couple joins them in Jarin ( Ken Leung ) and Patricia ( Nikki Amuka-Bird ). All of the travelers meet a mysterious traveler at the beach when they arrive in a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan ( Aaron Pierre ). And why is he bleeding from his nose? And is that a dead body?

From their arrival, the beauty of this beach, surrounded by steep stone, feels threatening. The waves crash and the rock wall almost seems to grow taller as the day goes on. When they try to walk back the way they came, they get faint and wake up on the beach again. And then things get really weird when Trent and Maddox are suddenly significantly older, jumping about five years in a couple hours. The adults figure out that every half-hour on this beach is like a year off of it. As the kids age into Alex Wolff , Eliza Scanlen , and the great Thomasin McKenzie , the adults face their own physical issues, including hearing/vision problems, dementia, and that damn tumor in Prisca’s body. Can they get off the beach before 24 hours age them 48 years?

What a clever idea. Rod Serling would have loved it. And “Old” is very effective when Shyamalan is being playful and quick with his high concept. “Old” doesn’t really feel like a traditional mystery. I never once cared about “figuring out” what was happening to this crew, enjoying “Old” far more as surreal horror than as a thriller that demanded explanations. Having said that, it sometimes feels like Shyamalan and his team have to pull punches to hold that PG-13. I wondered about the truly gruesome, Cronenberg version of this story that doesn’t shy away from what happens to the human body over time and doesn't feel a need to dot every 'i' and cross every 't'.

The actors all seem like they would have been willing to go on that more surreal journey. Most of the ensemble finds a way to push through a script that really uses them like a kid uses sand toys on a beach, moving them around before they wash away with the tide. Stand-outs include Sewell’s confused menace, McKenzie’s palpable fear (she nails that the best, by far, understanding she's in a horror movie more than some of the others), and the grounded center provided by Bernal and Krieps.

A director who often veers right when he should arguably go left, Shyamalan and his collaborators manage their tone here better than he has in years. Yes, the dialogue is clunky and almost entirely expositional regarding their plight and attempts to escape it, but that’s a feature, not a bug. “Old” should have an exaggerated, surreal tone and Shyamalan mostly keeps that in place, assisted greatly by some of the best work yet by his regular cinematographer Mike Gioulakis . The pair are constantly playing with perception and forced POV, fluidly gliding their camera up and down the beach as if it’s rushing to catch up with all the developments as they happen. Some of the framing here is inspired, catching a corner of a character’s head before revealing they’re now being played by a new actor. It’s as visually vibrant a film as Shyamalan has made in years, at its best when it's embracing its insanity. The waves are so loud and the rock wall is so imposing that they almost feel like characters.     

Sadly, the film crashes when it decides to offer some sane explanations and connect dots that didn’t really need to be connected. There’s a much stronger version of “Old” that ends more ambiguously, allowing viewers to leave the theatre playing around with themes instead of unpacking exactly what was going on. The conversation around Shyamalan often focuses on his final scenes, and I found the ones in “Old” some of his most frustrating given how they feel oppositional to what works best about the movie. When his characters are literally trying to escape the passage of time, as people do when their kids are growing up too fast or they receive a mortality diagnosis, “Old” is fascinating and entertaining. It’s just too bad that it doesn’t age into its potential.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film credits.

Rated PG-13 for strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language.

108 minutes

Gael García Bernal as Guy

Vicky Krieps as Prisca

Rufus Sewell as Charles

Alex Wolff as Trent Aged 15

Nikki Amuka-Bird as Patricia

• M. Night Shyamalan

Writer (based on the graphic novel "Sandcastle" by)

• Pierre-Oscar Levy
• Frederick Peeters

Cinematographer

• Mike Gioulakis
• Brett M. Reed
• Trevor Gureckis

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Old, review: A provocative horror that brings out the best and worst in M Night Shyamalan

‘sixth sense’ maestro seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot holes than creating wonder, article bookmarked.

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Dir: M Night Shyamalan. Starring: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee. 15, 108 mins.

M Night Shyamalan still can’t quite shake his reputation as the king of plot twists. It doesn’t matter what he’s done in the decades since Haley Joel Osment saw dead people. The label has stuck. And it’s not quite a fair one. Shyamalan shouldn’t be defined by his twists, but by his constant unpredictability. It’s a subtle but important difference. What makes his horror films so effective – when they’re at their best, at least – is that he allows his stories to exist in a sense of perpetual tension. At any moment, the path might change. They could slip wildly into a different genre. New nightmares could emerge from any corner. What determines whether a Shyamalan film is good or bad is how he deals with that build-up of terror. Does he let it linger menacingly in the air? Or try to soothe it out of his audience’s minds with a tidy ending? Old , in that sense, brings out both the best and worst in him.

In its opening scene, we’re introduced to what should be a blissful scenario: a wealthy, nuclear family on a tropical vacation. The parents, Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), gaze adoringly as their young children zoom around their hotel room. But the camera sits waiting on the outside, watching them through the windows, pacing up and down like a jaguar readying for the kill. What hidden torment will soon be revealed to us? Old feels like a repeat of Shyamalan’s 2004 film The Village – it’s provocative and inventive right until the point the director retreats into narrative neatness and conventional emotions.

A manager suggests the family spend the day at a private beach – one of those little-known hotspots that all holidaymakers crave. They’re soon joined by a second family – a doctor ( Rufus Sewell ), his mother (Kathleen Chalfant) and his modelesque wife (Abbey Lee), plus his young child. A little later, another couple, played by Ken Leung and Nikki Amuka-Bird, arrive. A dead body, floating facedown in the water, is the real starting point for Old ’s reign of terror. There’s a man, too, crouched in the shadows, who nervously reveals himself to be a popular rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) – it’s unclear whether the name is intended as a joke or just a sign of cultural disconnect.

But there’s a strangeness that starts to consume these people the very second they step foot on the beach. They can’t quite put their finger on it. But their bodies simply don’t quite feel like their bodies any more. The truth is that their cells have started to age rapidly – the reason why is part of the great mystery Shyamalan knows his audience will be eager to solve. Although the film is actually an adaptation of the Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle , by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, the director has provided his own resolution to the story.

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All the implicit themes at play here – not only of our general fears of ageing, but of the doomed inevitability that our medical histories create – run strongly throughout Old . There’s a primal potency to them. But the film, just like The Village , suffers from Shyamalan’s desire to forever chase a sense of order within the universe. Sometimes this can actually be quite refreshing – Old is the rare horror where the characters are all hypercompetent – but Shyamalan’s persistent refusal to leave behind any wonder, or instability, ultimately strips Old of its staying power. He seems more concerned with avoiding any potential plot hole that might send Reddit users into a rage than he does in creating something emotionally satisfying. It’s hard to talk about his films as something more than their endings when it’s the endings that always seem to decide their fate.

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M. night shyamalan’s ‘old’: film review.

Starring Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, the filmmaker's latest contrasts a lush tropical destination with a baffling disease of the flesh.

By John DeFore

John DeFore

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Landing somewhere between The Happening and The Village on the Shyamalanometer of Narrative Gimmickry, M. Night Shyamalan ’s Old places a dozen or so travelers together on a remote beach, then watches them live the rest of their lives in a day. Facing a strange phenomenon that greatly accelerates the aging process, strangers must collaborate in search of escape even as time worsens their deficiencies and the director strains (with ostentatious camera movement and some stunning scenery) to keep things from feeling like a Twilight Zone morality play.

Viewers who can take it at face value may find a chill or two here, but ultimately Old can’t escape the goofiness of its premise long enough to put its more poetic possibilities across successfully.

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Release date: Friday, July 23

Cast: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Kathleen Chalfant, Alexa Swinton, Nolan River, Kylie Begley, Embeth Davidtz, Eliza Scanlen, Alex Wolff, Emun Elliott, Thomasin McKenzie

Director-screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan

Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps play Guy and Prisca, parents who want to take their kids Trent and Maddox (Nolan River and Alexa Swinton) on a nice vacation before breaking the news that they’re going to separate. Their strife is no secret, though: Mom and Dad struggle to relax and enjoy a moment, even in a tropical paradise where cocktails are tailor-made to their tastes.

Seeming to intuit their needs, the resort manager quietly confides that he has an especially beautiful, secluded spot he only recommends to guests he really likes. So what if he also sends a few other guests to the same spot, and if the driver who takes them there (Shyamalan) can’t wait to get back in the van and hustle away from the site? Soon our heroes and a couple of other parties are settled in on a pristine stretch of sand with crashing surf at their feet and a vast wall of craggy rock rising up behind them. Then they find the corpse.

The dead woman was a friend of a famous rapper (Aaron Pierre) who was already on the beach when these guys arrived. A doctor ( Rufus Sewell ) is pretty quick to accuse the Black man of foul play, and Guy (along with a level-headed nurse played by Ken Leung) has trouble keeping their confrontation from getting out of hand. By the time things are nearly calm, the kids are five years older. And whenever someone tries to run back to the road to get help, he becomes disoriented in the passageway through the rock and winds up passed out, back on the beach.

In the kind of scene familiar to viewers of genre pictures, Old desperately has one character guess what’s going on in the hopes the audience will buy it and play along: Surely, Leung’s nurse deduces, there’s some strange deposit of minerals in the massive rock wall that somehow affects the speed of cellular growth in our bodies. Based on how quickly the kids (and the doctor’s daughter) are developing, we appear to be aging two years for every hour we’re here. If we don’t get off this beach, most of us will die of old age by tomorrow morning!

Or sooner. Several vacationers have conditions that, once sped up, present sometimes-disturbing threats to themselves or others. Anxieties are predictably high, and a capable cast handles the scenario’s weirdness as well as they can. Special credit goes to Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie, who step in to play Trent and Maddox as teens and therefore have the additional burden of imagining what it’s like to leap from prepubescence to young adulthood in a matter of minutes.

Long before he gets to his trademark twisty ending (not a bad one, this time), Shyamalan uses his sci-fi premise to deliver some predictable ironies. Any viewer will guess how rapid aging will treat the doctor’s stick-thin trophy wife (Abbey Lee). But those familiar with the director’s beloved Philadelphia and its engrossing Mütter Museum of medical oddities may resent a plot point that museum surely inspired: Without giving anything away, a heartbreaking exhibit there tells a true story of deformity that is transformed into a grotesque cartoon here — a sight gag that may be the last straw for viewers struggling to take the sometimes clunky screenplay seriously.

Rod Serling-like ironies aside, the movie does finally deliver satisfying answers to a question or two we’d given up hope of answering. But doing so requires a return to a familiar genre mode after a tranquil sequence where things might’ve ended, almost happily, in a very different mood. We’re all stuck together on a rock, aging too quickly, coping with irrational neighbors. Maybe we should just watch the waves and enjoy the company of loved ones for as long as we have left?

Full credits

Production company: Blinding Edge Pictures Distributor: Universal Pictures Cast: Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Kathleen Chalfant, Alexa Swinton, Nolan River, Kylie Begley, Embeth Davidtz, Eliza Scanlen, Alex Wolff, Emun Elliott, Thomasin McKenzie Director-Screenwriter: M. Night Shyamalan Producers: M. Night Shyamalan, Ashwin Rajan, Marc Bienstock Executive Producer: Steven Schneider Director of photography: Mike Gioulakis Production designer: Naaman Marshall Costume designer: Caroline Duncan Editor: Brett M. Reed Composer: Trevor Gureckis Casting director: Douglas Aibel

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Old Reviews

Shyamalan’s efforts to stretch this into 108 minutes leaves far too many dull lapses.

Full Review | Original Score: 0.5/5 | Aug 10, 2023

A HORRIFYING Concept that will have you leaving the theater contemplating your life & the time you spend in it!

Full Review | Jul 26, 2023

Old is one of those cases of a remarkably unique, intriguing concept failing to reach its potential due to an overall disappointing execution of too many ideas.

Full Review | Original Score: C- | Jul 25, 2023

Questionable conclusions aside, you still can’t deny the beautiful simplicity of Old’s concept or the cast’s stellar performances throughout the feature.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 25, 2023

...Old fails to live up to its potential because of its half-baked, poorly written characters

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

That pitch and pace unfortunately does the ensemble cast no favors, all of them struggling mightily to deliver some of the clunkiest dialogue of Shyamalan’s career.

Full Review | Jun 6, 2023

Though Old has a number of observable shortcomings, my overall impression of the film that sticks with me is that of excitement and amusement.

Full Review | Original Score: B- | May 2, 2023

Shymalan’s latest is compellingly perverse and wracked with a real sense of menace, making its hopeful denouement something of a betrayal.

Full Review | Mar 13, 2023

Quite beautiful and very stupid.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Oct 12, 2022

“Old” sees Shyamalan once again blending the supernatural with the real world to make something that’s uniquely his own. Not everyone will be onboard, but I was.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 17, 2022

Add Old to the unrealised potential column of M Night Shyamalan's filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Aug 8, 2022

The director’s latest reconfirms my original sentiments that M. Night Shyamalan is a one-trick pony who isn’t the most exciting filmmaker.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jun 10, 2022

"Old" is wildly inconsistent, preventing it from ever being genuinely as good as some of the director's better works such as "The Sixth Sense," "Unbreakable," or "Split."

Full Review | Original Score: 5/10 | May 20, 2022

Old's breakneck pacing once things start going south leaves little room to delve into character and personal relationships, or feature enough quieter flashes that would have helped to create sympathy for these people we've not long met.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Apr 26, 2022

iOldi represents the sort of solid mid-range thriller that use to litter the multiplexes 25 years ago.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | Mar 13, 2022

Try as it might, Old doesnt live up to its trailer, nor does it stand tall against some of Shyamalans other films.

Full Review | Feb 26, 2022

What is clear, however, is that Old is nowhere near the project many were hoping it would be and will leave many audience members and long-time Shyamalan fans shaking their heads.

Full Review | Feb 22, 2022

Shyamalan remains more invested in setting the hook than reeling in his audience.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Feb 12, 2022

While far from a masterpiece, Old is an entertaining thought exercise from one of Hollywoods most invigorating filmmakers.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 12, 2022

Old delivers on its buildup of tension, although it struggles to engage on a dramatic level.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 12, 2022

• What To Watch Next?

A group of holiday makers suddenly find themselves growing old and rapidly ageing, with their entire lives reduced into a single day. A mystery horror from M. Night Shyamalan.

From writer director M. Night Shyamalan comes the mystery horror movie Old , starring Gael García Bernal, Rufus Sewell ( The Diplomat ) and Vicky Krieps.

We're all pretty familiar with Shyamalan movies, with classics such as Signs and The Sixth Sense capturing the imagination of fans for decades.

An adaptation of a 2010 graphic novel Sandcastle , by writer Pierre Oscar Levy and artist Frederik Peeters, does this film have the same level of intrigue?

More importantly, what is it about, and is it worth watching?

What Is Old About?

Guy and Prisca bring their children, Maddox and Trent, to a remote paradise for a tropical holiday to mend their fractured relationships.

The resort, known for its idyllic beauty, attracts families seeking solace from their busy lives. However, what awaits them will defy all expectations.

As the family settle into their luxurious cabana, they notice something peculiar: time seems to be accelerating at an alarming rate.

Their children, who had just been carefree youngsters moments ago, begin to age rapidly before their eyes. Panic and confusion consume the family as they realise they are trapped in a mysterious phenomenon that alters time.

Soon, the resort's other guests face the same unsettling fate. There is Charles (Rufus Sewell), an esteemed doctor, who finds himself rapidly succumbing to old age . His wife, Chrystal (Abbey Lee), is left desperate, grappling with the loss of her husband's vitality.

Then, there is the enigmatic rapper Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), hiding behind his sunglasses, his youth slipping away with each passing minute.

As the realisation of their predicament sinks in, the guests, now ageing exponentially in just a few hours, frantically search for answers. They discover a foreboding cliffside cave, its entrance emanating an eerie aura. Inside, they stumble upon a rusted pharmaceutical research station, hinting at a secret experiment gone awry.

With each hour feeling like a lifetime, the group attempt to decipher the mysterious force controlling their existence. In the midst of their struggle, they discover that the secluded beach they had so eagerly sought out was a testing ground for a pharmaceutical company's experiment. The beach accelerates time, reducing their entire lives to a single day.

Trapped in a race against time, the survivors must find a way to escape the clutches of the beach before it consumes them entirely. But the beach guards its secrets with a relentless grip, and as tensions rise and bodies weaken, the group faces an uphill battle for survival.

Old Official Trailer

Is Old Worth Watching?

Through clever twists and turns, Old challenges perceptions of time, mortality, and the fragility of human existence.

M. Night Shyamalan masterfully weaves a tale that forces us to confront our own mortality, urging us to appreciate the fleeting moments that make up our lives.

It's the movie equivalent of the ‘what if you only had one day left to live' scenario.

Old is a thought-provoking movie that takes viewers on a rollercoaster of emotions. It explores the fragility of life, the inevitable passage of time, and the human spirit's resilience in the face of unimaginable circumstances.

However, none of this can rescue the movie from one major problem. The script. The character dialogue is clunky and unrealistic. In fact, it borders on monotone in delivery and in no way reflects how real people speak to each other.

It's such a shame to take a unique concept, with interesting ideas and an idyllic setting, and simply turn it into a movie that will annoy viewers, particularly when you throw in a lacklustre ending that undoes the whole concept of the film in the first place.

With little middle ground, Old is a movie you will either love or hate. I sit somewhere in between. It's watchable but a letdown from such a visionary filmmaker.

Old Movie Cast

Gael García Bernal ( The Mother ) as Guy Cappa, an actuary married to Prisca

Vicky Krieps as Prisca Cappa, a museum curator who is married to Guy

Rufus Sewell as Charles, a surgeon married to Chrystal

Abbey Lee as Chrystal, Charles's wife

Alex Wolff as Trent Cappa, Guy and Prisca's son

Thomasin McKenzie as Maddox Cappa, Guy and Prisca's daughter

Emun Elliott as adult Trent

Embeth Davidtz as adult Maddox

Luca Faustino Rodriguez as Trent (age 11)

Alexa Swinton as Maddox (age 11)

Nolan River as Trent Cappa (age 6)

Nikki Amuka-Bird as Patricia Carmichael, a psychologist married to Jarin

Ken Leung as Jarin Carmichael, a nurse and Patricia's husband

Eliza Scanlen as Kara, Charles and Chrystal's daughter

Mikaya Fisher as Kara (age 11)

Kylie Begley as Kara (age 6)

Aaron Pierre as Mid-Sized Sedan/Brendan, a rapper

Gustaf Hammarsten as the resort manager

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Let’s Talk About the Twist Ending of M. Night Shyamalan’s Old

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

From the moment The Sixth Sense blew audiences’ minds with a shocking conclusion so well conceived it helped mainstream the phrase “no spoilers, please” — M. Night Shyamalan ’s name has been synonymous with the twist ending . Old , his latest film, recalls the strengths the auteur first displayed on The Sixth Sense : An advanced ability to hook viewers with a mystifying premise plus the capacity to explore big themes like mortality and regret in the space of a fright. Old also exemplifies the faults in the director’s later efforts: a penchant for problematic portrayals of mental health and rudderless camerawork in service of a surprise that doesn’t feel earned.

Old begins simply: An apparently perfect family composed of mother Prisca (Vicky Krieps), father Guy (Gael García Bernal), their 6-year old son Trent (Nolan River), and their 11-year old daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton), travel to a paradisal island for a restive vacation. The island seems perfect: The hotel staff throws a welcome party, complimentary cocktails are offered, and the calendar is stuffed with events like parasailing, dance classes, etc. Trent even makes quick friends with a lonely local boy Idlib (Kailen Jude), who possesses valuable secrets concerning the island.

The affable resort manager tells the family of a private picturesque beach to visit. Upon arriving at the seaside oasis, however, not only do the family’s underlying pains spring to the surface, the sandy supernatural landscape seems to cause them to age rapidly. (Two years every hour, to be exact.) Trapped on the beach with two other families, surrounded by natural barriers, the imprisoned vacationers engage in a fight for survival against the elements and one another. In the horrors of Old is an imperative message: Savor life’s every minute.

If only the film’s ending lived up to that lofty mandate. Instead, the slow burn of a journey the characters take is more enlightening than the eventual twist. Along the way, we discover that Prisca, diagnosed with a benign tumor, cheated on Guy and the couple are nearing a divorce; within earshot of their children, each accuse the other of blowing up the marriage. But on the beach they do grow closer again, leaning on each other as Guy goes blind and Prisca grows deaf. By their death of old age, which they reach in a span of a day by the seaside, they barely remember what they were fighting about, deciding that it wasn’t so important in the context of their lifelong love.

A violent, schizophrenic cardiothoracic surgeon named Charles is also confined to the beach — providing a distasteful albeit common trope of a character who appears in even Shyamalan’s finest films. But Charles isn’t the most intriguing member of his family. Rather his vain, bombshell wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee) is the one to watch, the physical wear and tear of aging propelling her to a vicious mental breakdown, devolving to a kind of monstrous cave dweller. Is the horror filmmaker making a grand statement about ephemeral beauty standards? If so, then why does Chrystal become the movie’s single victim of blatant body horror, Suspiria style? (In another, more emotionally horrifying scene, a pregnant woman gives birth to a baby who, because of the time-warping nonsense of the beach, dies with a minute of being alive on the beach.)

Shyamalan undercuts many of his most fascinating plotlines in several mind-numbing missteps, namely by neatly sweeping away any lingering questions from the audience. It’s revealed that, yes, other families have died on this beach — they are why rusted silverware, clothes, and notebooks could be found buried in the sands. One found journal, replete with hand-sketched pictures, plainly explains why they’re unable to escape: The surrounding rocks are magnetized, somehow causing black-out headaches to anyone who dares to traverse them. (Between Old and F9 , magnets are becoming an essential 2021 plot device. At least with Old, there are no hints that we’re getting some larger, Shyamalan cinematic universe.)

But it’s Trent’s sneaking suspicion that the vacationers are being watched from a hillside that left me groaning into the ether. We learn that the driver who first took them to the beach — played by Shyamalan himself — has been spying on them the whole time. He works for a band of scientists who have been using the beach to try out various pharmaceutical drugs on sick, at-risk humans in an accelerated environment. (Each family, it turns out, included a member with a preexisting health condition. The test subjects’ rapid aging allowed the pharmaceutical companies to discover the “lifelong” effects of a drug in no time at all.) The families on the beach were merely guinea pigs.

The now adult Trent and Maddox, the only two survivors by the movie’s end, eventually escape from the beach thanks to a clue from Idlib, who tells them to swim through the (non-magnetized?) coral reefs. They arrive on the mainland to expose the nefarious scientist to the world, but nothing in their final scene, of Trent and Maddox helicoptering home to their aunt, is as emotionally satisfying as their time on the beach. (Why do these two adults need to be entrusted to their aunt? How, exactly, did they blow the whistle on the pharma baddies?) By inserting himself into the narrative, a common technique for Shyamalan, is the director poking fun at his reputation for caring more for puzzles than characters? I don’t think he entirely knows. He has the premise but not the experiential grounding to stick a philosophical landing.

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Old review: "It doesn't feel like it's going to age well"

GamesRadar+ Verdict

An intriguing concept is executed frustratingly poorly. On the Shyamalan spectrum, it’s more The Happening than Unbreakable

Why you can trust GamesRadar+ Our experts review games, movies and tech over countless hours, so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about our reviews policy.

There’s an audacious, absurd conceit at the centre of Old. Imagine holidaying on a Twilight Zone-type beach, which caused you to age years in the space of hours. It’s a potentially terrifying and/or thought-provoking idea. But despite delivering some early intrigue, writer/director (and, yes, cameo-er) M. Night Shyamalan’s execution never manages to avoid the concept’s inherent silliness, with too little substance to disguise the unintentional laughs.

We begin with the Capa family escaping for a seemingly much-needed break, and from the off, Old galumphs unsubtly. Mum Prisca (Phantom Thread’s Vicky Krieps) taps away on her phone (without even having the decency to turn the keyboard click-sound off) and dad Guy (Gael García Bernal) is an insurance actuary who analyses risk for a living; characters are signposted more blatantly than the high-end resort to which they’re heading.

Not long after they’ve been handed cocktails by reception it’s clear that theirs is a troubled marriage, but they’re hoping to suppress their issues for one last family holiday with their young daughter and son. They’ve barely finished their first breakfast when the manager offers them a secret escape to the aforementioned secluded bay. Getting there is no problem, but leaving proves more problematic when the beach’s adverse effects become apparent.

Shyamalan does mine some early tension from the concept, and the irony of being trapped in a wish-you-weren’t-here postcard idyll. There’s also a brief window of amusement trying to predict inevitable revelations. It’s hard to ever feel invested, though. It’s not just the dialogue that’s clunky and on the nose; the characters themselves suffer the same ignominy, including the other families they meet on the beach. Each feels like they’ve been selected because of their job, which they can refer to when spelling something out with thundering obviousness. There’s a doctor (Rufus Sewell) and a nurse (Ken Leung), a museum curator (that’s Krieps) and of course, Guy’s job means he frequently spouts statistics about how likely certain events are.

Even great actors like Krieps and García Bernal flounder with the hamfisted dialogue. As the children age (Alexa Swinton becomes Thomasin McKenzie, Nolan River becomes Alex Wolff, Kylie Begley becomes Eliza Scanlen), the reveals often feel more worthy of sniggers than gasps. There’s a lot that could be said about mortality and parent-child relationships, but Shyamalan almost always opts for a shock over anything more introspective; when the film does attempt to do something a little more contemplative, it’s too little too late.

A lack of ambiguity also works to Old’s detriment. When everything is laid out so plainly, you’re almost invited to rip it apart. A more enigmatic treatment of the central problem might have invited a more willing suspension of disbelief. As it is, it doesn’t feel like Old is going to age well.

Old is in cinemas from July 23. For more, check out the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way,

I'm the Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the running of the mag, and generally obsessing over all things Nolan, Kubrick and Pixar. Over the past decade I've worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at GamesRadar+, and you can often hear me nattering on the Inside Total Film podcast. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.

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‘Old’ Review: M. Night Shyamalan’s Latest Thriller Doesn’t Age Well

David ehrlich.

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Life is quite literally a beach in M. Night Shyamalan ’s “ Old ,” a go-for-broke “Twilight Zone” riff about a family who find themselves trapped in a sandy enclave where time passes so fast that a six-year-old in the morning will go through puberty by lunch, and a grandmother in the first act has almost no chance of being around for the third. Borrowed from the 2010 graphic novel “Sandcastle” by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, it’s the sort of unsettling idea that can trigger a wave of existential anxieties (and/or parental ones, which are often the same thing) just by thinking about it.

And yet Shyamalan’s very silly new movie — his best since “The Village,” but still a pale imitation of the slow-burn psychological thrillers that once earned him modern history’s most iconic Newsweek cover — isn’t nearly as fraught-provoking as its nature would suggest. Rather than allow this story to unfold at the real-time pace that its premise demands, Shyamalan opts instead for a hurried (if impressively perverse) series of cheap thrills that emphasize the body horror of aging over the more profound terror of feeling the years pass by.

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The result is a silly, well-acted piece of schlock that offers a decent time at the movies instead of the awful one that it promised us. And while there’s obviously some fun to be had in a film where “The Neon Demon” star Abbey Lee plays a trophy wife who goes full “Kuroneko” (complete with a billowing hooded kimono) on a bunch of teens because she gets a few wrinkles, Shyamalan’s latest — like virtually everyone in it — gets old fast.

Subtlety has never been one of Shyamalan’s gifts, but “Old” is so obvious that even Rod Serling would probably tell M. Night to dial it back a bit. We meet the bickering Capa family as they arrive at the tropical resort that mom Prisca found on the internet one day (she’s played by Vicky Krieps , who sets the tone for a movie in which every member of the cast is wonderfully overqualified), and the snippy conversation they have in the van makes it hard to believe that such ostensibly smart people could be stupid enough not to realize they’re in a campy horror movie.

Every single line of dialogue is the Shyamalan equivalent of a slasher victim announcing that they’re just gonna lose their virginity in the spooky garage real quick, but they’ll definitely be right back after that. “You have such a beautiful voice,” Guy Capa ( Gael García Bernal ) tells his pre-teen daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton), “I can’t wait to hear it when you’re older.” A beat later, he turns to his younger child Trent (Nolan River) and regretfully informs him that he’s too young to scuba. For his part, Trent is a hyper-loquacious adult man trapped in a six-year-old’s body; he sizes up his weary mother and declares, “The spontaneity has been stripped from her.”

It would be a funnier bit if not for the fact that all of Shyamalan’s characters talk as if they’ve been abducted by aliens, a feeling that’s only enhanced by this film’s clinical framing and zoological sense of remove. “You’re always thinking about the future!” Prisca snarls at her actuary husband as soon as they get a moment alone inside of their glass villa. “You’re always thinking about the past!” Guy snaps back at his museum curator wife. “You work in a god damn museum!” Listen closely, and you can all but hear the aliens excitedly scribbling away in their notes.

Okay, maybe aliens aren’t to blame for this one. After all, it’s Shyamalan himself — once again cameoing as the instrument of his characters’ suffering — who drives the Capa family to the special private beach where they’ll get to spend the day with just a small handful of other lucky resort guests. And never let it be said that Shyamalan doesn’t have a gift for creating memorably bizarre redshirts, most of whom are so wooden and broadly sketched that it’s more believable to hear them compare notes about the temporal properties of the beach’s rock wall than it would be to watch them buy groceries.

Half the fun of “Old” comes from seeing world-class actors try to wiggle out of Shyamalan’s writing like straitjacketed magicians in an underwater vault. British smarm machine Rufus Sewell has the time of his life as a cardiothoracic surgeon whose mental health deteriorates faster than his body, and it’s worth the price of admission just to witness the character’s strange fixation on a certain Marlon Brando movie (especially because it’s definitely not the one you’d guess). “The Neon Demon” star Abbey Lee makes a meal out of Sewell’s young trophy wife. Aaron Pierre, in a wild change of pace from his earth-shaking lead performance in “The Underground Railroad,” shows off his versatility in the role of an emotionally grounded rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan (Shyamalan is just raining threes with that one). Neither the great Ken Leung nor Nikki Amuka-Bird get quite as much to do in their roles as a kindly nurse and his seizure-prone wife, but they manage to find the integrity of every scene they’re in even when Shyamalan doesn’t seem to know where it went.

For all of its clumsiness, however, there’s no doubt that “Old” is supposed to be funny, even if Shyamalan reliably earns more laughs from our discomfort than he does from his own zingers. The film is full of guffaw-worthy beats that start with your hand over your mouth and end with your head shaking in your hands. Does Prisca only wrap her mind around the time-bending premise when she notices her son’s newly bulging genitals? Of course. Is that the most “I can’t believe he went there” moment in a Shyamalan movie where Maddox and a young girl he meets age into Alex Wolff and Eliza Scanlen as their child-like intellects are transplanted into the bodies of horny teenage virgins? Of course not. They don’t give Oscars for how brilliantly Scanlen navigates the strangeness of being a child and an adult at the same time, but maybe they should.

There are other sorts of gross-out moments in store for you, most of which ironically prove effective because of Shyamalan’s visual restraint. The aging effects are subtle enough that the other effects — a twisted limb here, an impromptu surgery there — are able to draft off their residual verisimilitude, which goes a long way in a movie that fails to sustain much interest in the mystery behind its horrors, but still builds to a coda that explains them all in imagination-deflating detail. “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.

Scary as it is to imagine how your body and all of its ailments might go haywire if you sped through 10 years in the span of five hours — and sick as that can be to watch — Shyamalan completely fails to connect such horrors to the mortal fears we live with every day. Shyamalan understands that nobody gets out alive, but he never wraps his head around why everyone keeps trying. The central point of his film eventually comes to double as the biggest knock against it: If life were really so short, it would be easier to appreciate the time that we’re given. By the time “Old” is over, the strongest feeling it leaves us with is that it just got 108 minutes shorter.

Universal Pictures will release “Old” in theaters on Friday, July 23.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Compelling concept, so-so execution; disturbing scenes.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Not many overtly positive messages, but it does ex

Guy and Prisca try to protect their kids and calm

High body count: Characters succumb to everything

Brief shot of a woman's bare back and butt as she

Occasional "damn," "goddamn," and one use of "f--k

Adults get special cocktails when they arrive at t

Parents need to know that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan's Old is a thriller that explores what happens when vacationing strangers are stranded on a beautiful beach that ages them at a remarkable rate. Like all of Shyamalan's movies, there are plot twists and turns, as well as a sustained sense of peril…

Positive Messages

Not many overtly positive messages, but it does explore moral ambiguity of certain kinds of research, as well as importance of truth-telling within families and sticking together in difficult circumstances.

Positive Role Models

Guy and Prisca try to protect their kids and calm people when they can. Patricia and Jarin try to gather everyone, ask them to voice their feelings, work together. As a nurse, Jarin helps take care of everyone as they get sick and exhibit symptoms. Trent and Maddox are devoted siblings. Main cast is moderately racially/ethnically diverse, including an interracial couple (Black and Asian), a Black musician, two White families, a couple of BIPOC supporting characters. Everyone is heterosexual. Several characters have different chronic illnesses or invisible disabilities. A man seems to have early onset dementia but turns out to be schizophrenic and behaves in a way that's drawn from stereotypes about mental illness (he's homicidal).

Violence & Scariness

High body count: Characters succumb to everything from water (drowning) to one another (one person is stabbed to death, one is slashed but survives, another dies from blood poisoning). People have epileptic seizures, have emergency surgery, experience a host of other terrible things. Several dead bodies are shown; they decompose to bones and ash incredibly quickly.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Brief shot of a woman's bare back and butt as she undresses to swim in the nude. A woman flirts with a server. A married couple embraces and kisses. Teens hold each other; they have sex off camera and a teen girl gets pregnant.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Occasional "damn," "goddamn," and one use of "f--king."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Adults get special cocktails when they arrive at the resort.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that writer-director M. Night Shyamalan 's Old is a thriller that explores what happens when vacationing strangers are stranded on a beautiful beach that ages them at a remarkable rate. Like all of Shyamalan's movies, there are plot twists and turns, as well as a sustained sense of peril throughout. There's a considerably high body count, with several disturbing scenes of dead bodies/characters getting sick, a surprise pregnancy and birth, emergency surgery, and the implications of children growing into young adults in a matter of hours. Various characters have chronic illnesses that manifest themselves in frightening ways. While the only sex in the movie takes place off camera, there's kissing and a scene of a woman stripping to swim in the nude (her bare back and butt are visible). Language is fairly tame except for a few uses of "damn," "goddamn," and one "f--king." Adults get special cocktails. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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Community Reviews

• Parents say (14)
• Kids say (42)

Based on 14 parent reviews

Another great movie that makes us think from M. Knight Shyamalan

A wildly underrated thiller, what's the story.

M. Night Shyamalan 's creepy mystery/thriller OLD, based on the graphic novel Sandcastle , follows four groups of vacationing strangers who are visiting their resort's special private beach together for the day when they realize that something is going irrevocably wrong. A family of four -- dad Guy ( Gael García Bernal ), mom Prisca (Vicky Krieps), 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton), and 6-year-old Trent (Nolan River) -- arrives at a tropical resort in an unspecified location. The manager recommends an exclusive excursion to a private nature preserve's nearby beach. They join a wealthy multigenerational family that includes an English chief of surgery ( Rufus Sewell ), his elderly mother (Kathleen Chalfant), trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), and their 5-year-old girl, Kara. They also realize that there's a single man there, whom tween Maddox identifies as rapper Mid-Sized Sedan ( Aaron Pierre ). Soon after, young Trent discovers a dead woman in the water: the fellow resort-goer who'd gone to the beach with Mid-Sized Sedan earlier in the day. A final married couple -- nurse Jarin ( Ken Leung ) and psychologist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) -- appear amid the chaos, and it's soon clear that the beach has unthinkable effects on everyone. They're all aging approximately two years per hour, leading the kids to quickly morph into teen versions of Maddox ( Thomasin McKenzie ), Trent ( Alex Wolff ), and Kara ( Eliza Scanlen ).

Is It Any Good?

Shyamalan's thriller has a strong cast and an initially riveting concept, but it's uneven, and most of the best parts are revealed in the trailer. The performances are serviceable -- particularly Wolff, who's become an expert at the emotional range necessary for creepy horror/psychological thrillers. McKenzie is also notably good at portraying someone who's aged too quickly and is having trouble processing all of her complicated feelings. The adults range in effectiveness, with the striking Pierre (who's excellent in The Underground Railroad ) having little to do as the confused and quiet rapper, Sewell chewing up the scenery as an arrogant surgeon, and Bernal and Krieps trying to telegraph how a marriage on the rocks would react when faced with an unthinkable crisis. Stand-outs include Leung and Amuka-Bird, who play the story's sole likable and stable couple.

As in all of his films, Shyamalan also cast himself in a notable, more-than-cameo role, and, while it was predictable, he should have given himself an even smaller part. The twists here, once the titular premise is revealed, are underwhelming (and one is as obvious as Chekhov's gun). There's no gasp-worthy Sixth Sense or The Others moment, which is fine, but the "aha!" doesn't even matter much, because audiences may no longer be invested in the outcome. The best, freakiest parts of the movie rely mostly on the kids' accelerated growth, along with the physiological abnormalities that different characters face while aging a lot in one day (not a spoiler; it's right there in the title). Old ranks somewhere in the bottom half of Shyamalan's filmography, but even so it's worth a look -- if only to see the kids fast-forward into teens.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the violence in Old . How much takes place on screen vs. off? How does that affect the way you feel about it? What's the impact of media violence on kids?

How does Old compare to Shyamalan's other movies? What are some of his movies' signature elements?

In this story, how do the diverse characters work together toward a common goal? Do they succeed? What do you think about the outcome?

Who, if anyone, do you consider a role model in the movie? What character strengths are on display?

Movie Details

• In theaters : July 23, 2021
• On DVD or streaming : October 19, 2021
• Cast : Gael Garcia Bernal , Vicky Krieps , Embeth Davidtz , Thomasin McKenzie , Alex Wolff
• Director : M. Night Shyamalan
• Inclusion Information : Latino actors, Female actors
• Studio : Universal Pictures
• Genre : Thriller
• Topics : Brothers and Sisters
• Run time : 108 minutes
• MPAA rating : PG-13
• MPAA explanation : strong violence, disturbing images, suggestive content, partial nudity and brief strong language
• Last updated : December 27, 2023

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Old review – M Night Shyamalan’s fast-ageing beach horror is top notch hokum

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

M Night Shyamalan is enjoying some serious mojo-recovery with his best film since The Sixth Sense: a woozy high-concept horror about being trapped on an apparently idyllic private beach, where time is fatally accelerated. Anyone who dislikes overheated beach holidays will probably already know the feeling of supernaturally rapid ageing, horror and face-shrivelling panic. And in fact these are the feelings I’ve often had watching some of Shyamalan’s recent films.

This is different. Old is an enthrallingly bizarre piece of old-fashioned entertainment: adapted by Shyamalan from the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters; it is exactly suited to Shyamalan’s talent for a particular kind of audacious, ingenious hokum. But unlike his mysteries The Village or The Happening , where Shyamalan appeared to lose his grip on the steering wheel halfway through (or earlier), the enjoyably preposterous yet creepy premise is maintained to the finish line. Old is a bit like Alex Garland’s The Beach , but with a dab of Twilight Zone creepiness and an ensemble cast that Agatha Christie might have imagined. Most of all, I found myself thinking that this could have come from the original series of Star Trek – and that at any moment, William Shatner might beam down among the panicky, deteriorating beach-dwellers, phaser at the ready. Sadly for them, however, these existentially stricken vacationers are on their own.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Vicky Krieps play Guy and Prisca, a stressed married couple with worries that they are keeping from their kids, six-year-old Trent (Nolan River) and 11-year-old Maddox (Alexa Swinton). They are badly in need of a holiday, and are relieved to arrive at the miraculously affordable luxury beach resort they found online, where they are told that the hotel complex’s driver (played in cameo by Shyamalan himself) can take them to a super-secret paradise beach on the other side of the island, only revealed to special guests. The beach is indeed lovely, but Guy and Prisca are disconcerted to find some other guests have been let in on the secret: super-rich rap star Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), testy surgeon Charles (Rufus Sewell) and his trophy wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), his ageing mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant) and his infant daughter Kara (Kyle Bailey). There is also a nurse, Jarin (Ken Leung) and his partner Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) who suffers from epileptic seizures.

At first, everything is glorious. But then there are sinister events. They do not seem to be able to leave the beach. And weird things are happening physically. Agnes, already frail, finds that her condition is suddenly worsening; wounds heal at an extraordinary rate. Crow’s-feet appear on faces. The kids complain that their swimming costumes are increasingly tight and uncomfortable. And one guest’s mannerisms become more than just scatterbrained. Somehow these people have found themselves at the beach at the end of the world. Perhaps these privileged wealthy consumers thought that this special place of wonderment in the developing world would allow time to stop for them, while they forgot their worries.

But maybe it isn’t really that their lifespans have been shortened to that of a mayfly. It is that a great human truth has been revealed to them – they were always mayflies. Now, in this time-lapse nightmare, they can see what has been hidden from them: mortality. And with death arriving as night falls … they had all better make up their minds what they think about the people that they love. Unless, that is, they can figure out a way of getting off the beach.

The elements of silliness and deadly seriousness are nicely balanced and although I wasn’t absolutely sure about the ending, which has maybe too neat a bow tied on it, this is just very enjoyable and I was on the edge of my seat, not knowing whether to flinch or laugh, though I did both. I loved the way the kids grew up while remaining trapped in a child’s bafflement and resentment. Time raced by while I was watching it.

• Peter Bradshaw's film of the week
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Directed by M. Night Shyamalan

It's only a matter of time.

A family on a tropical holiday discovers that the secluded beach where they are staying is somehow causing them to age rapidly, reducing their entire lives into a single day.

Vicky Krieps Gael García Bernal Rufus Sewell Alex Wolff Thomasin McKenzie Emun Elliott Embeth Davidtz Nolan River Alexa Swinton Nikki Amuka-Bird Ken Leung Aaron Pierre Abbey Lee Eliza Scanlen Kailen Jude Gustaf Hammarsten Francesca Eastwood Kathleen Chalfant Luca Faustino Rodriguez Kylie Begley Mikaya Fisher M. Night Shyamalan Matthew Shear Daniel Ison Jeffrey Holsman Deidra Ciolko Margaux Da Silva John Twohy Alejandra Useche Show All… Louise Walter Arturo A. Baez

Director Director

M. Night Shyamalan

Producers Producers

M. Night Shyamalan Marc Bienstock Ashwin Rajan Catherine Wolf McGrath

Writer Writer

Original writers original writers.

Pierre Oscar Lévy Frédérik Peeters

Casting Casting

Douglas Aibel

Editor Editor

Brett M. Reed

Cinematography Cinematography

Mike Gioulakis

Assistant Directors Asst. Directors

Tudor Jones Darrin Brown

Additional Directing Add. Directing

Ishana Night Shyamalan

Executive Producer Exec. Producer

Steven Schneider

Camera Operators Camera Operators

Benjamin Verhulst Nick Müller

Additional Photography Add. Photography

Francisco Adolfo Valdez

Production Design Production Design

Naaman Marshall

Art Direction Art Direction

Wilhem Perez Pamela Delgado Ico Abreu

Set Decoration Set Decoration

Karen Frick Ivanna Bolonotto Gloria Isabel Gomez Antonio Jimenez Offrer Jose Ramirez Sanchez Tommy Rodriguez

Visual Effects Visual Effects

Jeremy Beadell Craig Crawford Emily Austin Griswold Jiwoong Kim Lance Ranzer Jennifer Wessner Lahiru Jay

Title Design Title Design

Joseph Ahn Aaron Becker

Composer Composer

Trevor Gureckis

Sound Sound

Matthew Nicolay Chris Chae Sean Garnhart Skip Lievsay Prince Anselm Davi Aquino Rich Bologna Deonte Fly Deezy Chambers Goro Koyama

Costume Design Costume Design

Caroline Duncan

Makeup Makeup

Tony Gardner Katie Middleton Cristina Waltz

Universal Pictures Perfect World Pictures Blinding Edge Pictures

China Japan USA

Releases by Date

21 jul 2021, 22 jul 2021, 23 jul 2021, 29 jul 2021, 30 jul 2021, 12 aug 2021, 13 aug 2021, 18 aug 2021, 27 aug 2021, 17 sep 2021, 23 sep 2021, 05 oct 2021, 20 nov 2021, 02 dec 2021, 09 dec 2021, 01 feb 2022, 13 may 2022, 13 jul 2022, 19 oct 2021, 23 nov 2021, 24 nov 2021, 14 apr 2022, 21 may 2022, 28 may 2022, releases by country.

• Theatrical M

Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

• Theatrical 14
• TV Super Écran
• Theatrical 15+
• Physical DVD
• Theatrical 12
• Digital VOD
• Physical 12 DVD, Blu-Ray & 4K UHD
• Digital 12 MyCanal
• Theatrical 16
• Physical 16
• Theatrical Κ-15
• Digital 16 TVOD
• Physical 16 DVD, Blu-ray, 4K UHD
• Theatrical 14+
• Theatrical T

Netherlands

New zealand, north macedonia, philippines.

• Theatrical 15

Russian Federation

• Theatrical 16+
• Theatrical PG13

South Korea

Switzerland.

• Theatrical PG-13
• Digital PG-13
• Physical PG-13
• Digital PG-13 HBO Max
• TV PG-13 HBO

108 mins   More at IMDb TMDb Report this page

Popular reviews

Review by CosmonautMarkie ★★★★★ 74

My mind is blown by every facet of this film. The acting. The script. The story. The directing. All of it was awful. The worst movie I’ve seen in years 🏆

Review by Lucy ★ 75

this felt like when you take an edible and it hits wrong

Review by clementine ★★★★ 27

personally i am terrified of old people so this did a lot for me

Review by Jay ★½ 42

lets go to the beach-each lets go change our age

honestly the comedy of year, feels like every member of the cast was given a different interpretation of what the beach actually does mentally and physically. expecting a drinking game to develop as a companion to the film, ‘take a shot everytime someone introduces themselves with their profession’.

Review by Vinny Simms ★½ 16

every damn kid in an M. Night movie always gotta be like: "I can excuse the supernatural, but I draw the line at my parents getting divorced"

Review by demi adejuyigbe 24

This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

I am begging– BEGGING middle aged men to get new targets for satire! “Young women are vain, they love their phones” what else ya got!!!!!!

Review by Sara Clements ★½ 2

I need to start taking my calcium tablets in the morning

Review by ivy wolk 4

these characters interacting is just like talking to your friends parents while high

Review by The Last Kelton ★½ 6

imagine being the cop who has to go arrest a pharmaceutical company because they’ve been manipulating a magical beach to run drug trials. like what does that kind of paperwork even look like

Review by HHREVIEW ★★½ 5

Drink a coca-cola on that beach and immediately piss out a kidney stone

Review by sophie ★★★½ 14

must a movie be good? is it not enough to have the opportunity to lean over to your friend when m night shyamalan is on screen and whisper to them "that's the guy who directed the movie"?

Review by grace spelman ★★★ 2

Baby it’s Old outside!

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Is Old on Netflix?

By d.j. rivera | jul 23, 2021.

Film director M. Night Shyamalan has a large following when it comes to horror movie fans, and many Netflix subscribers are eager to know if his new film Old is available to terrify viewers on the streaming service .

Shyamalan has been known for some serious duds like The Happening, The Lady in the Water, The Last Airbender  and After Earth . But there is no denying his hits, which include The Village, Split, The Sixth Sense, Signs,  and hopefully the 2021 feature Old will be added to the list when it is all said and done.

The feature is inspired by the Swiss graphic novel titled  Sandcastle by Frederik Peters and Pierre Oscar Levy. The story follows a happy family on a tropical holiday that are having a great time until some unseen force on the secluded beach is causing them to age rapidly, reducing the rest of their life to a single day.

The cast of Old consists of Rufus Sewell, Eliza Scanlen, Gael García Bernal, Vicky Krieps, Thomasin McKenzie, Alex Wolff, Aaron Pierre, Ken Leung, Embeth Davidtz, Emun Elliott and Kathleen Chalfant. Between the excellent cast, the prolific filmmaker and the riveting premise, there are undoubtedly a number of solid reasons to check out Old , and it’s no wonder many subscribers want to know if it’s one of the many stellar horror titles available to stream on Netflix.

Is Old available on Netflix?

There are many horror movies and thrilling motion pictures available on the streaming service. However, Old is not one of the many choices Netflix has within its vast library of content.

The streaming service does have many items on its roster that people interested in watching Shyamalan’s Old will definitely find very appealing. Things Heard & Seen , Army of the Dead  and the Fear Street trilogy are just some of the exceptional horror flicks available on Netflix.

Where you can watch Old

Old is only available in theaters. Hopefully, when it does make its streaming debut, it will be on Netflix, but until official word is announced on its streaming home, the big screen is the only place to enjoy the latest from Shyamalan.

You can check out the trailer below:

Will you be watching Old in theaters this summer?

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The 15 best classic movies on Netflix right now

The streamer has a large library of timeless treasures from decades past.

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The best part about classic movies is that there are more and more of them with each passing year. That said, to ensure true timelessness, we only included selections made before 2004. Netflix has classic movies of all genres, for every taste group and age range. In addition to older features like American Graffiti (1973) and The Guns of Navarone (1961), there are also more modern heavyweights like Something's Gotta Give (2003) and Oldboy (2003).

Join EW as we highlight the 15 best classic movies on Netflix right now.

Amadeus (1984)

The world of classical music is much more entertaining than you could ever imagine, as this Best Picture winner proves. Milos Forman 's epic music biopic chronicles the (fictional) rivalry between the composers Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri. Based loosely on the real-life rumors that Salieri murdered Mozart, Amadeus takes creative license by composing a richly entertaining story of envy, sabotage, and wounded pride. In addition to its Best Picture win, Amadeus won seven other Oscars, including Best Actor for F. Murray Abraham for his virtuosic performance as Salieri. — Kevin Jacobsen

Where to watch Amadeus : Netflix

Director: Milos Forman

Cast: F. Murray Abraham, Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge, Simon Callow, Roy Dotrice, Christine Ebersole , Jeffrey Jones, Charles Kay

Related content: The 25 greatest Best Actor winners in Oscar history

American Graffiti (1973)

George Lucas ' nostalgic coming-of-age dramedy is an earnest ode to his formative years growing up in Modesto, Calif., in the early-1960s. Centering on a group of friends hanging out on the last day of summer vacation, American Graffiti is a slice-of-life film that follows their exploits over the course of the night. Some deal with relationship problems, while others are more concerned with celebrating their last night in their hometown before the rest of their lives begin. Told in a series of dreamy vignettes (aided by a killer soundtrack), the film transports the viewer back to a specific time and place, a snapshot of life before it got messy and complicated. — K.J.

Where to watch American Graffiti : Netflix

Director: George Lucas

Cast: Richard Dreyfuss , Ron Howard , Paul Le Mat, Charles Martin Smith, Candy Clark, Mackenzie Phillips , Cindy Williams, Wolfman Jack

Related content: Why nostalgia movies leave us dazed (but not confused)

Animal House (1978)

Like most gross-out comedies, Animal House received mixed reviews during its initial release, despite being hailed as a true comedy classic. The film follows college freshmen Larry and Kent as they find community in the form of the Delta Tau Chi fraternity. The frat frequently faces the threat of being dissolved by the college's dean, and numerous hijinks ensue. The film made a movie star of John Belushi and imprinted itself on the world of colleges and universities for decades. As EW's critic writes , "As obvious, grotesque, and sexist as much of its humor was,  Animal House  was stupidly funny." — K.J.

Where to watch Animal House : Netflix

EW grade: B– ( read the review )

Director: John Landis

Cast: John Belushi, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Tom Hulce, Donald Sutherland

Related content: Animal House : Behind the scenes

Born on the Fourth of July (1989)

Based on the real-life story of war veteran Ron Kovic, Born on the Fourth of July is a gripping story of a man losing faith. Tom Cruise plays Kovic, whose experience in the Vietnam War left him paralyzed and disillusioned with his country's leadership. He channeled his anger into protest, becoming a prominent figure in the anti-war movement. Cruise delivers one of his best performances as he tracks Kovic's growing cynicism upon realizing how little support is being given to him and his fellow veterans. The film earned eight Academy Award nominations, with Oliver Stone winning his second Oscar for Best Director. — K.J.

Where to watch Born on the Fourth of July : Netflix

EW grade: N/A ( read the review )

Director: Oliver Stone

Cast: Tom Cruise, Kyra Sedgwick , Raymond J. Barry, Jerry Levine, Frank Whaley, Willem Dafoe

Related content: 10 best movies about veterans' experience

Boyz N the Hood (1991)

Tre ( Cuba Gooding Jr. ), an aspiring college student, dreams big while trying to survive the streets of South Central L.A. in this absorbing coming-of-age drama. A war between rival gangs begins when Tre's childhood friend Doughboy ( Ice Cube ) is released from prison and now a member of the Crips. After the Bloods start conflict with Ricky ( Morris Chestnut ), the tension between the gangs reaches a breaking point. Writer-director John Singleton earned heaps of praise for the film including two Oscar nominations. EW's critic notes of Singleton's direction : "Through dialogue and atmosphere, he establishes how the cult of violence — of guns, and the neurotic masculine power they represent — has, in an era of hopelessness, become a face-saving religion for Black urban youth, one that’s working to devour all nonbelievers." — K.J.

Where to watch Boyz N the Hood through May 31: Netflix

Director: John Singleton 

Cast:  Cuba Gooding Jr., Ice Cube, Morris Chestnut, Laurence Fishburne ,  Nia Long ,  Angela Bassett , Regina King

Related content: Boyz N the Hood director, stars look back on the groundbreaking drama

The Guns of Navarone (1961)

The oldest film currently available on Netflix, The Guns of Navarone is also one of the best war films on the streamer. Taking place during World War II, the film centers on a mission by Allied forces to destroy a Nazi fortress and the two large-caliber guns preventing British troops from being rescued. Featuring an all-star cast led by Gregory Peck, David Niven, and Anthony Quinn, The Guns of Navarone is a good old-fashioned muscular adventure that earned seven Oscar nominations, winning for its special effects. — K.J.

Where to watch The Guns of Navarone : Netflix

Director: J. Lee Thompson 

Cast: Gregory Peck, David Niven, Anthony Quinn, Stanley Baker, Anthony Quayle, Irene Papas, Gia Scala, James Darren

Related content: Gregory Peck revisits his career peaks

L.A. Confidential (1997)

Warner Bros/Courtesy Everett Collection

Curtis Hanson 's sprawling noir homage, based on James Ellroy’s wonderful novel, follows three cops ( Russell Crowe , Guy Pearce , and Kevin Spacey ) tasked with solving a murder in the heart of Los Angeles. The movie is both a throwback and a recreation of the time, steeped in the glamor and mystique of old Hollywood. — Declan Gallagher

Where to watch L.A. Confidential : Netflix through May 31

EW grade: A ( read the review )

Director: Curtis Hanson

Cast: Kevin Spacey, Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kim Basinger , Danny DeVito

Related content: L.A. Confidential : Inside its iconic noir style

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

Netflix has a full Monty Python collection , but Holy Grail is, well, the holy grail of the comedy troupe's artistic output. This sendup of Arthurian legend finds King Arthur ( Graham Chapman ) traversing England in the hope of recruiting knights to his Round Table. After assembling his men, God commands him to find the Holy Grail, leading to a perilous adventure with plenty a memorable sequence (shout out to those pesky knights who say "Ni.") — K.J.

Where to watch Monty Python and the Holy Grail : Netflix

EW grade: B ( read the review )

Directors: Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones

Cast: Graham Chapman, John Cleese , Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin

Related content: Monty Python and the Holy Grail deleted animation scenes surface online

A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

One of the defining slasher movies of all time, A Nightmare on Elm Street expertly dwells in the hazy state between dreams and reality. This is where Robert Englund cemented his legacy as Freddy Krueger, an undead child-murdering entity who haunts the dreams of teenagers with the intent of killing them in the real world. His metal-claw glove and disfigured face remain burnt in the brains of generations of moviegoers, as do the gnarly deaths throughout the film, including a bloody dragging across the ceiling and a hanging by bedsheets. EW ranked it as the best film of the franchise , observing, "It cuts deep, tapping into our subconscious fears — and clawing long marks that will last forever." — K.J. Where to watch A Nightmare on Elm Street : Netflix

Director: Wes Craven

Cast: Heather Langenkamp, Robert Englund, Johnny Depp , Ronee Blakley, John Saxon, Amanda Wyss, Nick Corri

Related content: A Nightmare on Elm Street star Heather Langenkamp would 'love' to reprise role of Nancy Thompson in another Freddy movie

Oldboy (2003)

Mary Evans/Egg Films/Show East/Ronald Grant/Everett Collection

Park Chan-wook 's twisted masterwork follows a man (Choi Min-sik) who, after being released from a mysterious, extended imprisonment, vows to track down his kidnappers and his long-lost daughter (Kang Hye-jung). If you’ve seen the movie — a fantasia of blood and bad taste that would give John Waters occasion to blush — you’ll know he should’ve stayed well enough away. — D.G.

Where to watch Oldboy : Netflix

Director: Park Chan-wook

Cast: Choi Min-sik, Kang Hye-jung, Yoo Ji-tae, Kim Byeong-ok, Yoon Jin-seo

Related content: How the iconic Oldboy hallway fight influenced a generation of Hollywood action

A Passage to India (1984)

David Lean, one of the masters of grand-scale filmmaking, went out with this thought-provoking drama about heavy themes like imperialism and unconscious bias. The 1920s-set saga begins with a British woman, Adela ( Judy Davis ), traveling to India with the mother of the man she's set to marry. She eventually meets a friendly local, Dr. Aziz Ahmed (Victor Banerjee), who takes her to the Marabar Caves. After Adela leaves the caves distraught and running for her life, the incident becomes a scandal when Aziz is accused of raping her. Both sweeping and intimate in its storytelling, A Passage to India has a few elements that don't entirely hold up (namely, Alec Guinness in brownface) but it's a strong throwback to the kinds of human-focused epics that don't get made much anymore. — K.J.

Where to watch A Passage to India : Netflix

Director: David Lean

Cast: Peggy Ashcroft, Judy Davis, James Fox, Alec Guinness, Nigel Havers, Victor Banerjee

Related content: Oscar's history of recognizing those from the land down under

She's Gotta Have It (1986)

Spike Lee established with this feature directorial debut that he was going to be one of his generation's signature voices. Shot in striking black and white, She's Gotta Have It centers on Nora Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a Brooklyn artist who has relationships with three men, each of whom wants her to commit exclusively to them. But Nora is a free spirit who enjoys her liberation; of course, problems arise when the three men meet and decide to be more proactive about the situation. The depiction of the messy complications of polyamorous love was refreshing at the time and remains so today. Lee also adapted the story into a TV series for Netflix in the late-2010s. — K.J.

Where to watch She's Gotta Have It : Netflix

Director: Spike Lee 

Cast: Tracy Camilla Johns, Spike Lee, Tommy Redmond Hicks, John Canada Terrell

Related content: Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It Netflix series is 'crackling'

Something's Gotta Give (2003)

Nancy Meyers ' rom-com stars Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton as septuagenarians who, against their initial expectations, begin to fall in love whilst he recuperates from a health crisis at her opulent beachside estate. (Oh, and did we mention he’s dating her much-younger daughter?) This is Meyers’ best film, a well-observed character comedy that combines all of her directorial trademarks (aspirational real estate, mouth-watering food tableaus, extended running time) to a rather perfect effect. There isn’t a wrong note in the entire picture. — D.G.

Where to watch Something’s Gotta Give : Netflix

Director: Nancy Meyers

Cast: Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Frances McDormand , Amanda Peet , Keanu Reeves

Related content: The best Jack Nicholson performances

Starman (1984)

An alien's spacecraft is shot down as it approaches Earth, resulting in the alien crash-landing. The glowing species finds a lock of a widow's deceased husband's hair and takes on his physical form ( Jeff Bridges ). Jenny ( Karen Allen ), the astonished widow, reacts poorly at first but soon teaches him the ways of the world as he hopes to find a way back to his home planet. What could have been a cheesy sci-fi B-movie is instead a profound examination of lost souls who find each other at just the right time. "Needless to say, none of this should work," EW's critic writes , "But somehow, it does." — K.J.

Where to watch Starman : Netflix

EW grade: B+ ( read the review )

Director: John Carpenter  

Cast: Jeff Bridges, Karen Allen, Charles Martin Smith, Richard Jaeckel

Related content: The 40 best alien movies of all time

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

With just a few clicks, you're bound to land on a true-crime documentary while scrolling through Netflix . The streamer has specialized in the format through film and TV shows that recount fascinating, grisly criminal cases, and this acclaimed documentary by Errol Morris is lauded as one of the most influential in the subgenre. The Thin Blue Line revolves around the wrongful conviction of Randall Dale Adams in the 1976 shooting of Robert W. Wood. Through reenactments and interview testimony, Morris tells a gripping story about the miscarriage of justice. — K.J.

Where to watch The Thin Blue Line : Netflix

Director: Errol Morris 

Cast: Randall Dale Adams, David Ray Harris

Related content: Errol Morris on the present and future of documentary filmmaking: 'Hopefully I can keep it up'

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• The best Netflix original movies
• The best classic movies on Amazon Prime
• Finished Hollywood ? Here are the classic movies you should watch next

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Brooke Shields New Netflix Movie Misfire Is More Upsetting After Her 3-Year-Old Rom-Com With 75% On RT

• Negative reviews led to a dismal 22% Rotten Tomatoes score for Mother of the Bride .
• This score is disappointing compared to her well-reviewed 2021 Netflix movie A Castle for Christmas .
• A Castle for Christmas earned a 75% score largely due to the chemistry between Shields and her co-star Cary Elwes.

Mother of the Bride has been a critical disappointment compared to Brooke Shields' rom-com success from three years ago. The new Netflix original movie, which also stars Miranda Cosgrove, Sean Teale, Chad Michael Murray, Rachael Harris, and Benjamin Bratt, was written by Robin Bernheim, who has previously collaborated with Netflix on the Princess Switch trilogy and A Christmas Prince: The Royal Wedding . It was directed by Mark Waters, whose most prominent credits include the 2000s teen classics Mean Girls and Freaky Friday .

The Mother of the Bride star has been in the industry for decades, having kicked off her career as a model at just eleven months old and taken her first onscreen role before she turned ten. After starring in controversial titles including Pretty Baby and The Blue Lagoon and then attending Princeton, she returned to acting as an adult and held roles in prominent titles including Suddenly, Susan and 1999's The Bachelor . However, more recently, the star has taken onscreen roles less frequently, with her new Netflix movie marking her first live-action release since 2022's Holiday Harmony .

Mother Of The Bride Ending Explained

Netflix's Mother of the Bride is a classic weekend-wedding romantic comedy, but do the two lead characters get their romantic happily-ever-after?

Mother Of The Bride's Reviews Are Substantially Worse Than Netflix's 2021 Brooke Shields Movie, A Castle For Christmas

A castle for christmas's score is more than 50% higher.

Despite assembling a cadre of veterans of the genre both in front of and behind the camera, negative Mother of the Bride reviews ended up earning the movie a dismal Rotten Tomatoes score of 22% . While this would be a disappointment on any resume, it is even more upsetting in the wake of Shields' previous collaboration with Netflix, which was the 2021 rom-com A Castle for Christmas . The movie, which co-starred Cary Elwes, was part of Netflix's interconnected Christmas universe, which includes some of their biggest holiday rom-com franchises.

Netflix has released two Christmas rom-com trilogies, namely A Christmas Prince and The Princess Switch .

A Castle for Christmas was considerably more well-received than Mother of the Bride , earning a solidly Fresh score of 75% , though there aren't enough reviews for it to be considered Certified Fresh. In addition to beating Shields' new movie's score by more than 50%, it is the highest-rated installment in the entire Netflix Christmas universe. Below, see how A Castle for Christmas compares to the Rotten Tomatoes scores for every other movie in the same universe:

Why A Castle For Christmas' Reviews Are So Much Better Than Mother Of The Bride

Mother of the bride couldn't compete with one key castle for christmas element.

In addition to likely earning general goodwill for being holiday-themed, A Castle for Christmas excelled even by the standards of a streaming Christmas movie. This was largely due to Elwes and Shields' chemistry as they brought the movie's enemies-to-lovers arc to life, an element for which nearly every critic had glowing praise. Mother of the Bride , with its more ensemble-focused narrative, received no such praise. It was also criticized for its generic script and rote comedy, despite its memorable beachside location. Without a holiday hook or a strong focus on Shields' talents, the movie seems to have suffered considerably.

Click here to watch Mother of the Bride on Netflix

Mother of the Bride

Director Mark Waters

Release Date May 9, 2024

Cast Michael McDonald, Sean Teale, Chad Michael Murray, Rachael Harris, Benjamin Bratt, Wilson Cruz, Miranda Cosgrove, Brooke Shields

Runtime 88 Minutes

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In a Violent Nature

When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, his body is resurre... Read all When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it. When a locket is removed from a collapsed fire tower in the woods that entombs the rotting corpse of Johnny, a vengeful spirit spurred on by a horrific 60-year old crime, his body is resurrected and becomes hellbent on retrieving it.

• Andrea Pavlovic
• Cameron Love
• 4 User reviews
• 19 Critic reviews
• 65 Metascore

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• May 14, 2024
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We Finally Have an Update on When the Next ‘Insidious’ Movie Will Arrive

This will be the sixth installment in the franchise.

The Big Picture

• Insidious franchise set to release sixth installment on August 29, 2025, with impressive box office success of $730 million globally.
• Spin-off Thread: An Insidious Tale rumored, but next outing confirmed as a full sequel following Insidious: The Red Door.
• Original Insidious movie from 2010 still available to stream on Netflix, starring Patrick Wilson and Rose Byrne.

As per Deadline , the world renowned Insidious franchise, produced by Blumhouse Productions , will release its next outing in the summer of 2025 , Sony has confirmed. The official release date will be August 29, in a month that already includes the releases of a sequel to The Bad Guys , Bryan Bertino 's Vicious , and an as yet untitled Paul Thomas Anderson movie. It was also recently announced by Sony that another major horror franchise will release a sequel in the summer of 2025, with June 20 marking the arrival of Danny Boyle's 28 Years Later .

Following fresh from the Box Office triumph of Insidious: The Red Door , the next Insidious installment will be the sixth in the franchise, but will not be the Jeremy Slater -helmed Thread: An Insidious Tale , a spin-off that has been reported to arrive soon. So far, there is no concrete information as to when that spin-off will arrive, with this next outing set to be a full sequel.

'Insidious' Has Become A Horror Behemoth Since 2010

Since it debuted back in 2010, James Wan and Leigh Whannell' s Insidious franchise has gone from strength to strength, proving to be durable in a horror landscape that currently favors old franchises over new ones. In total, the franchise has grossed over $730 million globally since its inception , thanks to five current installments that keep luring audiences back. That total gross comes off the back of a mere $42.5 million total budget, proving that horror is perhaps the best franchise for crafting excellence with small means.

The first Insidious was released in 2010, and proved so popular that a second, Chapter 2 , was fasttracked into production and arrived in 2013. With the success showing no signs of slowing down, Chapter 3 arrived in 2015 as the franchise changed from FilmDistrict to Focus Features. For the fourth outing, The Last Key , Universal Pictures took charge, with the most recent installment, The Red Door , the first to be distributed by Sony, the company behind this upcoming sixth film. The Insidious franchise has so far seen the likes of Patrick Wilson ( Fargo ), Rose Byrne ( Bridesmaids ), Ty Simpkins ( Jurassic World ), Lin Shaye ( The Grudge ), and Angus Sampson ( The Mule ) star. The first two chapters were directed by horror icon Wan, with the third directed by Whannell, the fourth by Adam Robitel , and the fifth by Patrick Wilson.

The sixth installment of the Insidious franchise will premiere on August 29, 2025. The first Insidious movie is currently available to stream on Netflix.

A family looks to prevent evil spirits from trapping their comatose child in a realm called The Further.

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‘Young Sheldon’ Is One of TV’s Most Popular Shows. So Why Did It Just End?

The “Big Bang Theory” spinoff aired its last episodes Thursday night, but the franchise will continue on CBS this fall.

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By Noel Murray

This article includes spoilers for the “Young Sheldon” series finale.

In last week’s episode of the CBS sitcom “Young Sheldon,” a laid-back, beer-drinking Texas high school football coach named George Cooper (Lance Barber) says goodbye to his family and goes to work. He never comes home: George dies of a heart attack later that day. The tragedy sets up the series’s last two episodes, which premiered Thursday night on CBS: They are about what happens when someone so steady, so reliable and so unassuming is just … gone.

A spinoff of “The Big Bang Theory,” the long-running CBS hit, “Young Sheldon” has been steady, reliable and unassuming over its seven seasons. This warm family sitcom, which fills in the back story of the “Big Bang Theory” breakout character Sheldon Cooper — played by Jim Parsons in the original and Iain Armitage in the prequel — has quietly been one of TV’s most-watched shows since it debuted in 2017.

And now it, too, is gone. The series finale takes Sheldon from the small town of Medford, Texas, where he attended high school at 9 and college at 11 as his family tried to understand and accommodate his genius, to the California Institute of Technology, where “The Big Bang Theory” is set. The episode included appearances by Parsons and Mayim Bialik, whose character, Amy, marries Sheldon in the original show.

The franchise will continue this fall with another spinoff: “Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage.” It will follow Sheldon’s good ol’ boy older brother George Jr. (Montana Jordan) and his wife, Mandy (Emily Osment), as they raise their baby daughter.

“Young Sheldon” was a smash from the start, and while its network TV audience has shrunk (just like most every other show’s), its episodes elsewhere have drawn newer, younger viewers . Reruns air on the cable network TBS almost daily. Netflix licensed the show late last year, and it has since appeared regularly on that service’s self-reported Top 10 most-streamed TV series.

Yet despite its pervasiveness in TikTok memes , “Young Sheldon” has never been much of a cultural phenomenon. Television critics rarely write about it, and the Emmys have ignored it entirely — it has yet to get a single nomination. “The Big Bang Theory,” one of TV’s most-watched shows for much of its 12-season run, which ended in 2019, had a mixed critical reputation. But it did get press coverage, and was a legitimate Emmy contender, earning four nominations for best comedy series and picking up four wins for Parsons.

The “Young Sheldon” finale, meanwhile, came and went on Thursday night without much advance hype. Unless you regularly watch shows on CBS, you may not have known it was ending.

You may also be wondering: If it’s so popular, why is it ending?

In a phone interview, Steven Molaro, who created “Young Sheldon” with Chuck Lorre, and Steve Holland, an executive producer who has been a writer on the show since Season 2, explained that the series has always had an expiration date. This is because the story they inherited from “The Big Bang Theory” established that Sheldon began attending graduate school at Caltech at 14, the same year his father died.

The “Young Sheldon” team delayed the inevitable once, by holding the characters of Sheldon and his twin sister, Missy (Raegan Revord), at the same age for two seasons. But that trick could not be repeated indefinitely.

“The premise of the show is that an exceptional young kid is thrust into a world where everyone is older than him,” Holland said. “But as soon as Iain aged and Sheldon aged, he didn’t look that out of place anymore, even in college.”

So when Holland and Molaro sat down with Lorre to plot out Season 7 after the writers’ strike was settled, they decided their prequel had reached its natural conclusion. The tight post-strike production timeline meant they had to inform the cast about the decision on a group Zoom call, which surprised some of them. (In a Variety interview , Annie Potts, who plays Sheldon’s “Meemaw,” described her initial reaction as “shocked” and “ambushed.”) But whatever mixed feelings the cast may have had about the series coming to an end, it doesn’t show in their performances in the final two episodes, which strike the usual “Young Sheldon” balance of gentle good humor and soft sentimental pangs.

In the penultimate episode, “Funeral” (which aired Thursday night right before the finale), the Cooper family struggles with saying goodbye to George, with Sheldon revisiting his last moments with his father and thinking of the things he could have said to him but didn’t.

The episode ends on a poignant note, as Sheldon’s devoutly religious mother, Mary (Zoe Perry), rages at God at the memorial service before Meemaw steps in to lighten the mood. (She jokes that no one is sadder about George dying than the Lone Star beer company.) Sheldon, still lost in his own head, imagines the heartfelt eulogy he is too numb to give.

The finale, “Memoir,” tells a more typical “Young Sheldon” story, about Mary trying to get Sheldon baptized before he leaves for college. In framing scenes, the older Sheldon and Amy argue about his parenting of their own children, underlining one of the show’s main themes: that Sheldon’s parents, while dealing with all the usual messes of everyday life, did the best they could to take care of him. The episode closes with a shot of the 14-year-old Sheldon at Caltech, connecting everything back to “The Big Bang Theory”; the adult Sheldon is working as a Caltech physicist when that series begins.

Holland said Lorre pitched the idea of having Parsons and Bialik appear in the finale to make the episode feel a bit more “significant.” (Parsons, who is also an executive producer of “Young Sheldon,” has been the show’s narrator from the beginning, but this is his first on-camera appearance.) As for the differences between the last two episodes — one heavy, one lighter — Molaro said they wanted something “a little more positive and upbeat” for their ending.

“Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage,” which was created by Lorre, Molaro and Holland, will be a multicamera sitcom shot with a live audience, like “The Big Bang Theory.” (“Young Sheldon” is a single-camera series with no audience, a choice Molaro said was made to “let the show feel like its own thing.”) They hope to have some “Young Sheldon” regulars appear as guest stars, if they figure out how to do that without turning the new show into what Holland called “Older Young Sheldon.”

As for the legacy of “Young Sheldon,” that will now depend largely on whether it remains as popular as it has been on Netflix, where Molaro said the show is being discovered by kids who have never been in the habit of watching prime-time network TV. Despite the lack of critical buzz, “Young Sheldon” has always been good family television, with a likable cast of youngsters and showbiz veterans helping to tell slice-of-life stories that push deeper than some viewers may expect into topics like religious hypocrisy, marital strife and how it feels to share a household with someone both irritatingly eccentric and astonishingly brilliant.

The final episodes of “Young Sheldon” were designed to hit many of the notes that the show had played so well during its run, ending with a finale that Holland wanted to have “a little bit of humor and a little bit of hope.” The series finishes in an understated and touching way — going out just as it came in.

An earlier version of this article in one instance misspelled the given name of an actor. He is Iain Armitage, not Ian.

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This 17-year-old the office episode gets a stealth follow-up in netflix's divisive new comedy movie.

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10 Best The Office Episodes, Ranked

"nervous breakdown": john krasinski reacts to the office's bts dinner episode 16 years later, the office's reboot should thank steve carell after the actor's cameo clarification.

• The Office continues to influence popular culture, with a new Netflix movie referencing the iconic sitcom.
• Many cast members have found success post-The Office, including Andy Daly in a quirky new role.
• Despite mixed reviews, The Office's "Benjamin Franklin" episode still has its moments, like the memorable Pam and Karen confrontation.

Despite ending in 2013, The Office still manages to have a large impact on popular culture, with a divisive new Netflix comedy movie being the latest project to reference the series. Widely regarded as one of the best sitcoms of all time , The Office provided viewers with a wealth of memorable episodes and laugh-out-loud moments across its nine-season run . Now, a certain episode of the show from way back in 2007 has received an unexpected follow-up.

Many members of The Office cast have gone on to have even greater success both on TV and in film. In fact, the show featured many early guest appearances by comic actors who have since become household names. One such example of this is a comedy actor who has starred in dozens of TV and movie roles over the years, including in a recent Netflix film, where he plays a character with a pleasing connection to his appearance in The Offic e.

From emotional moments to some of the most hilarious scenes in a sitcom, The Office’s best episodes reveal how rich and compelling the show was.

Andy Daly's Unfrosted Quaker Oats Role Is A Great Follow-Up To His "Benjamin Franklin" Character In The Office

There's a surprising connection between the two projects, unfrosted (2024).

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Jerry Seinfeld's new Netflix movie, Unfrosted , tells an exaggerated version of the true events that led to the creation of Pop-Tarts. The comedy film features an ensemble cast, with Unfrosted 's celebrity cameos including Jon Hamm, John Slattery, Dean Norris, Tony Hale, and many others. One of the briefest cameos is made by actor and comedian Andy Daly, who appears as one of Unfrosted 's numerous breakfast mascots . He plays Isaiah Lamb, the face of Quaker Oats. Interestingly, Daly's appearance in the movie has a neat link to his role in The Office .

Daly appears in just one episode of The Office - season three's "Benjamin Franklin" - where he plays a Benjamin Franklin impersonator named Gordon. When Michael asks Jim to hire a stripper, Jim instead orders Gordon as a joke. He then convinces Dwight that Gordon is the real Benjamin Franklin, something that Dwight tries desperately to disprove. However, Gordon has an answer for all of Dwight's questions, which inevitably (and hilariously) drives him insane.

In The Office , Andy Daly is credited as 'Andrew Daly'.

Daly's cameo in Unfrosted is, therefore, pleasing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it was the second time in the actor's career that he was allowed to chew the scenery while dressed in historical attire. Secondly, Benjamin Franklin had strong ties to the Quakers in Pennsylvania, so Daly's latest role ended up creating a strange link to his past in The Office . Though Quaker Oats wasn't originally founded by Quakers, it has had an association with the religious society since the late 1800s. While Ben Franklin pre-dates Quaker Oats, Daly's appearance in Unfrosted , nevertheless, cleverly connects to his role in The Office .

Why The Office's "Benjamin Franklin" Episode Received Such Mixed Reviews

It's certainly not considered one of the show's best.

While "Benjamin Franklin" is far from the best episode of The Office , it does have its moments

Throughout its run, The Office had some truly great episodes. Unfortunately, "Benjamin Franklin" doesn't stand out among them. The episode received a mixed response from critics when it first aired, which jarred with the positive reaction to the rest of the third season. Criticism was largely aimed at the episode's relatively low gag rate and the sexist nature of the A-plot. Michael's eagerness to hire a stripper for Bob Vance's bachelor party certainly means that "Benjamin Franklin" is one of the few episodes of The Office that have aged poorly .

Additionally, while the Dwight/Ben Franklin impersonator subplot provides a fair few laughs, some reviewers believed that the joke went on too long. Arguably, the joke would've been better-suited to a cold open rather than the B-plot of a whole episode. While "Benjamin Franklin" is far from the best episode of The Office , it does have its moments, with the long-awaited confrontation between Pam and Karen being singled out as a highlight of the episode.