“Honor the old. For they are great in number, and one day you will all be like them.”
Forget preparing for the zombie apocalypse. Instead, we should be trying to prevent the “old people” apocalypse, which from what we’ve seen in Netflix’s latest release, Old People, would be much worse mainly because it would ignite by our actions or lack thereof. Written and directed by Andy Fetscher, Old People is a painful observation of what becomes of our forgotten elders. The film elicits fright through trepidatious scenes and the evocation of guilt. If you need a lesson in respecting your elders — you’ll be an expert by the end of this film.
Ella is traveling back home with her two kids — Noah and Laura — for her sister’s wedding. It’ll be the first time she’s been back since she divorced their father, Lucas. Her hometown is now a ghost town, filled with predominantly old folks, seemingly forgotten by the rest of the world. Among them is Ella’s father, Aike, whom she hasn’t spoken to since her divorce. He was distraught by his daughter “splitting” the family. When a thunderstorm rolls in the night of the wedding, residents of the town retirement home engage in strange behavior before breaking free and ransacking the town in a violent killing spree.
In times of yore, an avenging spirit was thought to inabit old people. A dark power that took possession of the frailest members of the clan. And drove them into a seemingly blind rage.
The film opens after this quote, and we see a caregiver arrive for her shift at the home of her elderly patient. The apartment resembles a scene out of a Hoarders episode when she walks in. She looks around for her patient, and we see another quote in a picture hanging on a wall —
Solitude is the elderly’s due.
Shortly afterward, the elderly man attacks the caregiver. Smashing her head in with a fire extinguisher until you can no longer hear the body underneath it; the metal clanks against the floor because nobody is left.
Each kill scene in the film is equally as grotesque as the first — inflamed with rage. The scenes are gruesome as if the old people had been suffering in silence for so long the wrath literally expels. They sit and suffer alone, without visitors, while the young people who remain carry on without giving them a second thought.
At its core, the film is a call to action for people to consider the elderly. They want you to think about the last time you spoke with or visited your loved ones. They want to know what you’re doing to eradicate elder care issues. They want you to consider how it must feel to spend your last days alone at the mercy of others who may not care much about your quality of life.
When Ella goes to the retirement home to retrieve her father for the wedding, she notices the condition of the facility and its people. The facility and the residents are dirty. And the caregivers have accepted that this is just how things are because they are understaffed. Lucas’ new girlfriend, Kim, is a caregiver at the facility. She says they have to strap the elderly to their beds, so they don’t wander off because there aren’t enough people to keep track of them. And some of them stay in their soiled clothes for extended periods.
In the film, the group of old people were drawn to the sound of music playing at the wedding reception. There were no old people at the wedding except the bride’s father, Aike. Where were the groom’s parents? Extended relatives? It can’t be that they didn’t exist, so why weren’t they thought of?
It’s almost as if the old people were compelled to attack younger people. As if they couldn’t control the impulse any longer. They were gripped by their own grief. To be fair, some people definitely asked for a hasty conclusion. But for most people in the film, pure absent-mindedness was the charge of their crime. It was simply too late to walk it back with a mere apology when it hit the boiling point.
Fetscher ensures you don’t miss the warning in the closing narration. Laura speaks about how she asked Aike if there could’ve been a time when young people could’ve prevented this from happening, and he told her that he couldn’t remember that far back. But, there was a time.
For us, watching the film — our time is now.
Old People is streaming on Netflix.
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
