South Yorkshire’s foremost cinemagoer and West Street Live Annual Short Film Competition runner-up (2008), Matt Karmode casts his critical eye on the month’s new and noteworthy films.
What’s the only thing worse than being old? That’s right – being old and German. In Old People, one of Netflix’s latest emissions, the plight of the common Germanic gerriatric is documented with startling accuracy.
When I blew out the candles on my 10th birthday cake (I was 9 but had had two cakes the year before) I wished to one day manage my very own cinema. These days we all have our own cinemas; with high quality screens and high-speed internet capability built into TV’s, phones, computers, and tablets, we can stream the movies of our choosing whenever and wherever we want. What a waste of a wish.
Although there is no real substitute for the authentic in-person IMAX cinema experience, occasionally there are legitimate reasons we cannot attend our local movie theatre; a pandemic, for example. Or financial troubles, issues with transport, fire, agoraphobia, angoraphobia, Al-Gore-aphobia, flooding, terrorism, sex, work commitments, sex work commitments, temporary blindness, state funerals, estate funerals, magistrate funerals, barrister weddings, barista weddings, coffee shop waitress cremations, belated bar worker bar mitzvahs, sleep, pet emergencies, a fatal allergy to popcorn… you get the idea. With so many things keeping us from the cinema, it’s no wonder the films produced by and for streaming services are of an increasingly high standard.
Written, directed, and edited by Andy Fetsher – a man so well-known his IMDb page does not need a picture – Old People is just such a film. Taking inspiration from George A. Romero’s Night of The Living Dead, Fetsher (not to be confused with the late Andy Fletcher of Jopesci Mode) uses the language of horror films to highlight prejudices in modern society, not tackling matters of race as in Romero’s case but matters of age, specifically our mistreatment of European OAPs – or EurOAPS.
The film follows Ella (Melika Foroutan) as she travels back to her eerily remote German hometown for a family wedding. When, on the night of the wedding, residents of a local retirement home go on a killing spree, it’s up to Ella, her family, and the wedding guests to survive and escape.
It’s impossible to get into the mind of any old person, let alone a German one; however, Old People does a fantastic job at portraying the pains, frailties, and frustrations of a contemporary Germanic senior citizen. Take retirement home resident Reincke (Adolfo Assor) for example. When he wanders into a marital bedroom and interrupts the bride and groom consummating their marriage by bludgeoning both parties to death with a metallic orb in a sock, then stuffing the murder weapon in the bride’s exanimate mouth and placing her into the disfigured arms of her newly butchered husband, you can’t help but think, ‘Yes, that is exactly what an old German person would do.’
4 pairs of 3D glasses out of 5.
MK
