It's no secret that PG-13 horror films can be just as terrifyingly effective as their R-rated brethren. Horror auteur M. Night Shyamalan made his breakthrough with a PG-13 film, and one could make a convincing argument that his R-rated horror movie is his worst. I don't find it interesting to call Shyamalan's latest, Old, a good horror film "despite" its PG-13 rating.
What I find interesting is the fact that Old got a PG-13 rating at all. It's a violent, intense, upsetting thrill ride full of visceral set pieces and mayhem and death that got under my skin more than many contemporary R-rated horror films. I can't imagine recommending it as being appropriate for a kid the way other PG-13 horror films are. Shyamalan has spoken of using this film to get back in touch with his "dissonant," "provocative," and "ghoulish" side. In the grotesque tableaus struck upon time and time again in Old, Shyamalan has more than succeeded.
My question is this: How'd he do this all and get away with that PG-13 rating?
The short answer could be: because he doesn't show as much explicit violence as R-rated films. But that's kinda not objectively true (and not to keep bringing it up, but this is definitely a more violent film than his R-rated The Happening)! In Old, we see in pretty clear detail a nude, dead woman wash up ashore, a body opened with a knife, an enormous tumor removed from a stomach, a dead baby, the relentless stabbing of several people, a woman completely annihilated by widespread broken bones, a man whose skin is obliterated by poisonous rust-blood, and as you can tell by the first image of this piece, a decomposed ribcage that Shyamalan has the audacity to stick a camera through. I have seen every Saw film and I felt more disturbed by what's conjured in Old than any of those; more disturbed, perhaps, because of this nagging, metatextual contradiction that this is somehow deemed as family-friendly as the latest PG-13 MCU blockbuster.
Maybe Old skates by because of the masterfully disorienting way Shyamalan and MVP cinematographer Michael Gioulakis cover their carnage. Old is constructed with measured, immaculate, weaponized, and highly unorthodox intention. The camera frames humans in exaggerated perspectives, fills the screen with negative space before crash-zooming abruptly, and swirls around its subjects relentlessly, agonizingly, ever-kinetically. In this busy visual technique, Shyamalan and Gioulakis are able to show just enough of what they need to show before roving away, leaving the rest out of our sights, instead letting the full extent of the partially suggested mayhem fester in our imaginations. To put it in another macabre way, if the quantity of nasty shit is lesser than the quality of nasty shit, a PG-13 can still be applied.
But "quantity" matters in the overall tone and pace of Old, both of which might be keys to how this PG-13 film punches so hard and leaves such bruises. The intensity of cinematography combines with an intensity of writing and editing (Shyamalan is, as ever, a master of the craft) to slam full-throttle on the gas. When the film starts living and leaning into its premise — what if a beach made you old? — it offers multiple variations on that theme simultaneously, quickly, even ludicrously. These snatches of terror do not occur within minutes of each other, but rather seconds (and when the film is at its maniacal best, within the same, constantly swirling shot). Moments of breathing room and reflection are rare; this is thematically appropriate, given that the film is about the horrors of how rapidly all time passes without enough time for rest, and also responsible for the majority of its successes as a "ghoulish" genre work. Old smacks you again and again and again like a four-armed Goro of discomfort (if Goro also got old from being on the old beach).
Yeah, there's a twist at the end of Old, and yeah, Shyamalan explains the ever-living snot out of it. But its overall legacy comes not as a feat of cleverness but of bluntness, of fiendishly gaming the system and scaring the bejeezus out of us anyway. Old dives into the deep end and lets itself drown while its lifeguard looks away at just the right moments. It's the gnarliest PG-13 yet.
Old is now available on 4K blu-ray from Universal Studios.