Old Man: One Look in My Eyes and You Can Tell That’s True, by David Bax

Lucky McKee’s Old Man belongs to a sub-genre that’s been quite robust of late, the “loner in a remote cabin” movie. From Michael Sarnoski‘s Pig to Robin Wright‘s Land to Shawn Linden‘s largely-overlooked gem of nastiness Hunter Hunter, people choosing to remove themselves from the world in favor of stubborn self-subsistence is a subject much on the mind of filmmakers these days. There’s a bitter joke at the heart of these tales, though, as our dying environment no longer provides as much respite from the troubles of society as it once may have.

But Old Man, being a McKee film, has something stranger and more surprising on its mind. More than one thing, actually. So it’s a good thing McKee cast Stephen Lang in the title role, an actor whose hungry commitment has helped sell more than one high-concept, suspension-of-disbelief-stretching character over the course of his career. So when his union-suited hermit starts his day by waking with a jolt and immediately beginning a stream-of-consciousness mumble in a high-pitched, scratchy, heavily accented voice, it’s a sign of the bizarre fun to come, provided you give yourself over to it.

Lang’s not alone for long, though. The action kicks off properly when a lost hiker named Joe (Marc Senter) knocks at the door looking for help. If the old man is is almost parodic in his craggy looniness, Senter matches Lang by being equally archetypal in his portrayal of Joe as a clean-cut, naive, full grown Boy Scout. What follows is (essentially) a two-hander, a bizarre, metaphysical morality play about trust and human nature with occasional bursts of horrific madness.

Old Man, in addition to having traits in common with the “loner in a remote cabin” sub-genre, also feels of a piece with Neil LaBute‘s recent House of Darkness, another film that draws on horror tropes to illustrate its verbose moral interrogations. In that film, though, it’s always clear which party has the upper hand in the bout of words. Here, nothing is certain; not allegiances, identities or even reality itself.

Old Man‘s precipitous relationship with the real world is reflected in the score by Joe Kraemer, a longtime collaborator of Christopher McQuarrie (The Way of the Gun, Jack Reacher). It almost feels incomplete to categorize it as a score, in fact, as it brings in other elements of non-diegetic, otherworldly sound design.

If you’re looking for a traditional horror movie with reliable frights doled out in a recognizable pattern, well, McKee’s name alone should have been warning enough that you’re in the wrong place. That’s not to say that Old Man isn’t scary from time to time but it’s even more of a mental and even physical ordeal by virtue of its unnerving and unending tension.