✔️ 2022-10-22 09:16:51 – Paris/France.
I dare not hate the Germans.
I'm sorry, what a bad sentence I wrote, and how misunderstood it will be! Let me explain myself better.
Platforms Streaming have many faults, but they also have the undeniable merit of having opened their catalog to other cinematographic universes than the American or British one. We have even noticed this in countries like Italy or Spain, where Netflix, in particular, finances local products, designed first for local distribution, but then also distributed in the rest of the world. And we have also noticed it because, in the same logic, our catalogs are full of films and TV series from countries from which we normally only receive a few selected products each year. Old is the latest example, and here is its trailer:
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The Netflix catalog (I'm talking about the red N because it's there Old, but similar reasoning can also be made for Prime, Disney, HBO Max, etc.) is populated by movies produced in exotic countries like Germany or Italy. Netflix's catalog, however, is also a place full of films that would once have been called "direct-to-video": low-budget products and still belonging to a so-called "genre", whether horror, thriller or horror. / Thriller in French. The blasphemous marriage of the two – films about unheard of subjects and films made in non-English speaking countries – has given us, over the years, many interesting products (we think The clouda French eco-horror on bees), so many unspeakable nonsense and some sensational cases and for a few days even viral (remember The hole?).
Netflix
In this composite and multifaceted panorama, German works almost always manage to stand out. Just think about Darkthe series that resurrected the fandom of lost through time travel, paradoxes and tricks: 90% of the audience of Dark I never thought I would one day find myself watching a series in German with subtitles. Of course, German products are not always good, but let's take as an example blood red sky, a vampire movie set on an airplane. It's mediocre and badly written, but it has some good ideas and a slightly different take on the bloodsucking figure, which is why it manages to stick around despite being a 5.5 movie.
So my opening sentence was meant to sum this up: once in a while, a German movie comes to Netflix, and it's almost always horror or action, and every time I end up watching it, I leave dissatisfied as a reviewer but still excited and excited, intrigued by what I just saw. If I were German genre cinema, I would try to sell myself like this: "I may suck, but I never bore you!" » Old It's far from crap, but it's frayed cinematography that's too busy pounding our heads with its messages and metaphors to remember to have, say, rhythm. And even…
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The first thing you want to do at the end of Old is to visit your remaining grandparents and give them a big hug. Unfortunately, I don't have any more, and that's why I'm here to write this article. Old is a film that warns younger generations not to abandon their elders: "don't forget Grandpa Pedro and Grandma María", he says, "if you don't want them to become zombies!" It takes place in an anonymous town in Germany, one of those places in the middle of nowhere that is becoming depopulated as new generations decide to move to the city to try to have a life.
Concretely, this anonymous town is characterized exclusively by the presence of a large nursing home: 90% of the population is made up of hospices, and the few remaining people under the age of eighty work there. Among them is Kim, who is the new girlfriend of Lukas, divorced from the protagonist Ella, who is precisely one of those who left the city to settle in Berlin: Old it's mostly a family and dining room drama, and for once it's not overdone: there are indeed many dining rooms, not least because Ella and Sanna's family home is a gigantic mansion and dark.
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Sanna is about to get married, so Ella, accompanied by her children Laura and Noah, returns to the village, where, among other things, she will meet her ex-husband, with whom relations have remained cordial and who, perhaps, who knows, he still has feelings for her, maybe even mutual. It is on this atmosphere of Italian dramatic comedy that the horrific side of the film is grafted, prefigured from the opening of the film by a vaguely folkloric and above all scripted explanation. You should know, in fact, that according to local mythology there is an evil spirit that takes hold of an elderly person from time to time when they feel alone, abandoned and rejected by society, which does not know what to do with them. its fragility. This spirit transforms the person into a kind of bloodthirsty zombie, who growls, stammers and has only murder in mind.
The case is presented to us as something that happens regularly and about which society does not seem to worry too much: the elderly are still marginalized and locked in residences to spend their last years there, from time to time one of between them becomes a monster, kills someone, gets arrested and starts again. The problem is that this time we find ourselves in a city full of old people, a ghost town inhabited only by the forgotten bodies of those who once inhabited it, and only waiting for the days to pass and bring them a little closer of death. . And so this mass of old people, provoked as the young people say by the celebrations of Sanna's wedding, are en masse possessed by the evil spirit, and suddenly what seemed to be an ordinary wedding becomes The Night of the Living Grandparents.
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The editing is classic zombie movies, and even the behavior of the friendly old men follows the rules of the undead, only with a bit more cleverness and tactical savvy, needed to counter the fact that they're people. very fragile and not particularly fragile. portable. Instead, the amount of violence, even gratuitous, is typically German: Old it's such a bad movie that it's sometimes unpleasant, pornographic in the way it portrays the many murders that characterize it. It's a movie of smashing skulls and smashing bones, of blunt objects smashing into the teeth of a poor woman who might not be so poor considering how which she treats her grandmother.
It's a horror film about the clash of generations, the revolt of the forgotten: the metaphor is easy and Andy Fetscher, screenwriter and director, stages it with all the delicacy of a boar stuck in a meat grinder. His film is above all a warning, even for himself, given that he was born in 1980: the war between the old and the young is coming, he tells us Oldand no matter how it ends, it will still leave a lot of corpses on the ground.
Netflix
It is therefore unfortunate that Andy Fetscher, writer and director, does not control any of these activities. Old It lasts an hour and a half, but it's still too long, stretched out by scenes from endless soap operas which, moreover, arrive at the least opportune moments. He has an idea (people in a house, zombie grandparents outside) but can't decide how he wants to use it, so he goes around in circles for long minutes. And it's a film that repeats itself again and again, when it would have done well to rely on its idea without giving in to the temptation to ramble and philosophize.
Finally, Old it's a mediocre film that might have needed the input of people other than its author to find shape and direction. However, I dare not hate him, even when he spits banalities in my face: because it is all the same The Night of the Living Grandparents, and because it is mischievous and without respect for the viewer or good taste. It's a punk movie, and since when do punk bands have to know how to play too?
SOURCE: Reviews News
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