Aaron Pierre – Memphis Flyer

“What movie did you see?” asked my friend Sarah.

“Old,” I said. “The new M. Night Shyamalan.”

“Oh. How was it?”

“Meh. I didn’t hate it,” I said.

“Wow. That’s quite an endorsement, coming from you!” she said.

It’s true. I’m on record as not being a Shyamalan fan. More precisely, I hate his movies. It’s not personal. I’m sure he is a lovely person who is kind to animals. And I respect his skills. It’s obvious from even the most cursory examination of films like The Village and Signs that this is a guy who has memorized every frame Alfred Hitchcock ever shot. It’s just that he’s terribly one note, and not nearly the writer a generation of producers seem to think he is. After hitting with The Sixth Sense, he’s leaned on his signature gimmick of the late-film plot twist. Take The Happening, for example, where he sets up a high concept premise, treads water for an hour, then belly flops when he tries to resolve it cleverly.

(While I’m busy pissing cinephiles off, I recently watched the Turner Classic Movies tribute to another Hitch worshipper, Brian de Palma, and decided he’s also a hack.)

Anyway, Old is Shyamalan’s return to the theaters after two box office successes, Split and Glass. You’ve got to admire the commitment to short titles. Old starts with a young family heading to a beach vacation at the all-inclusive Anamika Resort on an island off the coast of Mexico. The marriage of the not very creatively named Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps) is on the rocks. They’re trying to keep it from their son Trent (played at this point by Nolan River) and daughter Maddox (Alexa Swinton, initially), but they’re not doing a very good job. When Trent plays with his action figures, they argue like mom and dad.

The hotel, though, is super nice, and the staff so attentive that they seem to know everything about their guests. Kinda spooky, right? It gets spookier: The resort manager (Gustaf Hammarsten) has the same energy as that guy in the Chevy commercials who plays sinister pranks on unsuspecting consumers. (“We’ve kidnapped your family to highlight all the features you’re going to love on our all-new Chevy Abductor crossover SUV.”) The manager offers to transport the family to a secret, secluded beach where nothing bad can happen.

Spoiler alert: Bad things happen.

Nolan River is one of four actors who play Trent at various ages in *Old*.

Once at the beach, Guy (is that a placeholder name that stuck?) and Prisca (was she once called “Girl?”) discover they’re not the only ones invited to this “exclusive” deserted beach. There’s also Charles (Rufus Sewell), a doctor; his wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee); daughter Kara (played at age 11 by Mikaya Fisher); and mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant). Lurking on a beach is a guy who Maddox recognizes as a rapper named— I kid you not — Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre). They soon find that they’re trapped on the beach, and aging at an unnaturally fast rate.

Aaron Pierre plays a rapper named Mid-Sized Sedan. No, seriously.

In the big picture of horror movie settings to get trapped in with a group of disposable characters, of which you might be one, I’d say a secluded beach is probably the best you could hope for. Usually, it’s a haunted mansion or a deserted farmhouse surrounded by zombies or an eastern European hostel with a secret basement torture chamber. I have to admit, as Shyamalan went through his usual paces of stilted dialogue and obvious, studio-note exposition, I occasionally zoned out and just watched cinematographer Mike Gioulakis’ vibrant images of the surf rolling in.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t gag my way through Old. Or maybe it’s because the premise is taken from one of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories, “Frost and Fire,” in which survivors of a spaceship crash discover that the alien planet’s radiation ages them a lifetime in only eight days, and it takes generations to effect an escape. Or maybe I’m just starved for entertainment.

Old never rises to Bradbury’s plane of contemplation, but at least it tries to explore the psychic side of aging as the ultimate body horror. Unlike, say, being dismembered at summer camp or transforming into a giant man-fly, it’s a horror scenario we will all face — if we’re lucky.

Perhaps Barry Jenkins’ biggest claim to fame is as a party to an accident. At the climax of the 2017 Academy Awards, presenters Warren Beaty and Faye Dunaway were handed the wrong envelope and mistakenly announced La La Land as the winner of Best Picture. In fact, the winner was Jenkins’ film Moonlight.

It was the right choice. La La Land is an entertaining piece of craftsmanship, but Moonlight is legitimately one of the best films of the 21st century. Jenkins has the rare combination of complete technical mastery and a deeply empathetic mind. In other words, he can not only frame a good shot, he knows how to get the best from actors, too. Both skills are included in the “director” job description, but you’d be surprised how many well-paid people lack chops in one category — or both.

Jenkins, a native of Florida, cut his teeth in the low-budget indie world, and his projects until now have been as modestly scaled as they are brilliantly executed. Even his historical drama, the 2018 adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk, which earned Regina King a Best Supporting Actress Oscar, remained focused on the story of two star-crossed lovers. With his new limited series for Amazon, The Underground Railroad, Jenkins’ vision was given the opportunity to expand to epic size. The director is more than up for the challenge.

The Underground Railroad is based on a novel by Colson Whitehead, which has been confounding genres and expectations since it was published in 2016. It’s a rare bird that won both the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. In Whitehead’s alternate American South of the 1850s, the Underground Railroad is not a secret network of safe houses and smuggling routes set up by Abolitionists and free Blacks to transport slaves to the free states of the North, and eventually Canada, but instead an actual railroad that runs underground. That detail, in which the metaphorical is made real, is key. This story is not about the historical reality of Antebellum America, but the psychological reality of Black experience in America.

Cora (Thuso Mbedu) is a slave on a plantation in Georgia. Her mother disappeared from the plantation years ago, when Cora was a child, and is assumed by local slave catcher Ridgeway (Joel Edgerton) to be the rare Black person who actually escaped the clutches of the Southern racial caste system. In the harrowing opening episode, we see the price of a failed escape, as Big Anthony (Elijah Everett) is tortured to death for the amusement of his masters’ garden party. The image of the plantation owners dancing a minuet while burning a man to death might seem over-the-top if the florid cruelty of Jim Crow lynchings wasn’t so exhaustively documented.

Cora is convinced to flee with her friend Caesar (Aaron Pierre), and they plunge into a series of adventures all over the South as they flee the relentless Ridgeway. Jenkins is cinema’s foremost romantic — his stories have always revolved around the core of a beautiful love story — but the relationship between Cora and Caesar takes a back seat to the creation of spiraling tension and otherworldly images. It’s never clear where Cora’s dreams and visions end and the “real world” begin. She flashes back to memories of fear and mistreatment on the farm, and her trauma manifests in unexpected ways.

But Cora’s not the only one living in a dream world. The racial apartheid system ties everyone into cognitive knots. Cora’s first stop is a utopian community in South Carolina, where progressive white benefactors are running a research program “for the potential betterment of Negro lives.” That facade soon falls apart. Alternate North Carolina, where Black people have been completely exterminated and outlawed, operates like Nazi Germany during the Final Solution, right down to an Anne Frank figure hiding in an attic. Both racists and abolitionists believe they are doing what the Bible tells them to do. Most chilling of all is Ridgeway’s sidekick Homer (Chase Dillon), a 10-year-old Black boy who is a fearsome, emotionless slave catcher.

Jenkins is one of the most talented composers of images working today. Every few minutes, he throws out a shot that would be a career high for lesser talents. His color sense is simply unmatched. The visual fireworks are coupled with striking, subtle performances from Mbedu and Pierre — and, really, everyone on the screen. The Underground Railroad joins the ranks of Twin Peaks: The Return and Watchmen as the pinnacle of what ambitious, artful television can achieve. It’s also a warning of, as one “station agent” observes, “The savagery Man is capable of when he believe his cause to be just.”

The Underground Railroad is streaming on Amazon Prime.