Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Old People’ on Netflix, a German Horror Outing in Which Old People Become Murderous Zombies

Spooky Season MMXXII continues to ramp up with the usual annual onslaught of thrillers and horror movies, case in point Old People, a Netflix outing that essentially asserts that boomers are out-of-control zombies bringing about the end of civilization. TELL US SOMETHING WE DON’T ALREADY KNOW, Old People! I jest, sort of. This German creepfest imagines what might happen if geriatrics rose up with anger and vengeance for being treated poorly, which sounds like a halfway-decent horror-movie premise; let’s see if it offers us something fresh or just the same old doddering cliches.

OLD PEOPLE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: TITLE CARD: IN DAYS OF YORE – and here I need to interject to say that movies should never, ever open with a title card that says “in days of yore.” It’s a sign, as they say, of ominous portent. Nobody wants yore in a movie. Yore is a hot dog with no condiments. Yore is the beige color they paint on the walls before you move in. Yore is a bore. I digress: there’s an old thing that says the time will come when sad old people will erupt with rage because they’re sad and old. Then we see an elderly man in a wheelchair. In his apartment hangs an embroidered sign that reads, “Solitude is the elderly’s due.” So much for words of inspiration. Someone give this guy a little Live Laugh Love. His in-home nurse stops by and he somehow summons the strength to brandish his oxygen tank like a club and batter her skull until it makes that crunchy, splattery sound. Then he leans out his window and howls like a wolf at the city, where sirens blare and people scream and things burn. Looks like he’s not alone in totally losing his shit.

But that was now, and this is then: The day before, in flashback, because that’s how movies work. It’s called “futzing with the narrative.” Ella (Melika Foroutan), her teenage daughter Laura (Bianca Nawrath) and young son Noah (Otto Emil Koch) drive to the countryside for aunt Senna’s (Maxine Kazis) wedding. The kids are excited to see their dad Lukas (Stephan Luca) although Laura still blames Ella for the divorce. They’ll also get to see their grandfather Aike (Paul Fassnacht), except he’s in a nursing home now – a nursing home that’s a dilapidated depository for neglecterinos. The place is pretty much run by weeds now: It’s grossly understaffed, it’s a filthy mess and it’s populated by confused elderly people who stand still and stare and don’t make a sound, and as the family walks through to retrieve Grandpa it’s like that scene from The Birds where they gingerly tiptoe through the room trying not to upset anything. Notably, this is one of many instances in this movie where people walk… slowly… through… a room… to the point where the movie consists primarily of scenes in which people walk… slowly… through… not just a room, but any set piece. The film does not discriminate with where it sets its walk… slowly… scenes.

The night of the wedding is a dark and stormy night, because of course it is. Everyone dances and parties, and Lukas’ new girlfriend Kim (Anna Unterberger), who happens to be one of the nurses at the retirement home, glares at Ella, fearing the reunion of a broken family, but she should just hold tight, because there’s lots of movie left. Meanwhile, across the way at the nursing home, the olds go feral, slashing up the orderlies with broken glass. They’re led by a wild-eyed ol’ coot, who sneaks into the cottage out back to interrupt the consummation of the marriage by vomiting peach-pie filling in Sanna’s face and smashing her head with a big brass bedknob in an argyle sock, which struck me as rather rude. Ella and Lukas and Kim and the kids barricade themselves in the main house as it’s slowly being surrounded by wide-eyed, slow-shambling, murderous old people. And it’s at this point we realize this is just a zombie movie dressed up in murderous-old-people-movie clothing.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Night of the Living Dead, Night of the Lepus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and pretty much any movie with a siege in it.

Performance Worth Watching: Gerhard Bos stirs up a good smidgen of fear and menace while playing the wild-eyed ol’ coot.

Memorable Dialogue: Your miscellaneous and sundry shouting-of-instructions at the characters as they refuse to adhere to common sense: Move faster! Just kill him already! Seriously, move faster!

Sex and Skin: A classic coitus interruptus scene as the newlyweds can’t even finish before they get the heck killed right out of them.

Our Take: The characters in Old People are all top-shelf grade-A USDA-certified puddingheads. A few more brain cells among them and this movie would be significantly less dramatic. The only time they show a sign of intelligence is when the Plot Device must be utilized in the third act, after it was introduced in the first. YOU thought that brief conversation about an underground tunnel was just extraneous detail, but YOU thought wrong, my friend!

Remarkably, writer-director Andy Fetscher elongates 25 minutes of movie into 100 – quite the achievement, considering the profound statement he’s trying to make is a finger-wagging: Hey, elder abuse isn’t nice. I already mentioned the walk… slowly… scenes, which are scenes that make sense in roughly 15 percent of the movies that feature them. This movie’s monotony levels are off the charts. In the red. Pinging right through the glass. The monotony spreads like an odorless, colorless gas, making us sleepier and sleepier as we stare slack-jawed at scene after scene of old people shuffling about, braying like hounds, raising axes and broomhandles over their heads with dramatic lighting around them. Eventually, arms and hands clamber into open doorways and windows and old people chase the relative youths and the actual youths and it’s all the same zombie-movie tropes we’ve seen hundreds of times before.

I will say, the movie has a certain style and aesthetic: Footsteps go tok… tok… tok… tok… on the floor and doors go creeeeeeakkkkkk as characters open and close them with grossly unnecessary deliberation and we hear either the wind going woooooooo or the choral score trying desperately to amp up the operatics with the sound of 100 big toes being stomped simultaneously: YAH, it goes. Pause. Wind. Pause. Tok… tok… tok… tok… creaaaaaaaakkk… Pause. YAH. It’s maddening. I theorize the movie is trying to turn us into puddingheads, too.

Our Call: But Old People is a METAPHOR for the current crumbling of civilization!, someone might say. That person has tapioca in their skull, too. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.