Director/Screenplay – Andy Fetscher, Producers – Benjamin Munz & Florian Schneider, Photography – Ralf Noack, Music – Chris Bremus & Steven Schwalbe, Visual Effects – Lugundtrug (Supervisor – Markus Hauf, Stefan Kessner & Max Stolzenberg), Special Effects Supervisor – Piotr Kryzczmonik, Makeup Effects Designer/Supervisor – Martin Kleist, Production Design – Marianna Mikolajczak-Lisiecka. Production Company – Arbor Films/Constantin Television.
Cast
Melika Foroutan (Ella), Stephen Luca (Lukas), Bianca Nawrath (Laura), Gerhard Bös (The Old Man), Paul Fassnahct (Aike), Otto Emil Koch (Noah), Anna Unterberger (Kim), Richard Manualpillai (Malick), Louie Betton (Alex). Maxine Kaznis (Sanna)
Plot
Ella travels with her two children to attend her sister Sanna’s wedding. Also present is her ex-husband Lukas and his new wife Laura. At the same time, a group of seniors surround the area and begin violently attacking younger people. Those in the house are forced into a desperate siege situation.
Old People was the third film from German director Andy Fetscher. Fetscher had previously made the horror films Bucharest Flesh (2007) and Urban Explorer (2011), along with assorted tv work. Old People was released directly to Netflix.
The idea of zombified seniors attacking the young is an amusing one. On the subject, there was previously a really crappy British film Granny of the Dead (2017), although Cockneys vs Zombies (2012) did feature seniors defending themselves against a zombie outbreak. Two months earlier the same year, there was also The Elderly (2022), a much more creepy Spanish film with an almost identical subject. That said, Old People does not actually seem to be a Zombie Film – there is no sense the seniors have been resurrected from the dead. The nearest you could label might be as a Mass Insanity film.
Exactly how you label the film is a good question. Andy Fetscher leaves explanations for what is going on a frustrating blank – it appears to be a film where seniors just suddenly decided all at once to leave their retirement villages and come and attack young people. The voiceover dialogue at the end seems to get awfully outraged about the way that younger people abandon their seniors, which would indicate that Fetscher is making a social allegory more than any type of zombie or mass insanity film. That said, the film just stands with a big confusing question mark over it as to why things are happening.
Gerhard Bös as one of the seniors on the attack
It also feels a bit of a stretch of believability watching the seniors act like a zombie horde and mindlessly attacking the younger generation. For one, these are all seniors with incredible strength where they are able to frequently overpower the younger and fight with an incredible tenacity. Most of the seniors I know could be toppled over with one push, while a good fall would probably end with a broken hip or bad bruising. There is a conspicuous lack here of seniors on walking frames, in wheelchairs or with sight and hearing, not to mention dementia, issues.
All of that said, Andy Fetscher does generate a reasonable film once he arrives at the home siege sections. There is a particularly gripping sequence where the husband’s new wife (Bianca Nawrath), jealous of his attachment to the former wife (Melika Foroutan), locks Melika outside with the horde and the husband (Stephen Luca) struggles to get her back in, where the fierce battle to rescue her occurs all in a narrow crack of light from the open door as the horde of aged on the other side press in. Or the ferocity that comes in some of the later scenes when the aged break into the house. In these scenes, it feels like that the film is going somewhere before the letdown of the ending where Fetscher lets everything fade out on a sentimental statement about the plight of the elderly being ignored by the younger generation.
