Updated September 21, 2026.
Every once in a while, a film surprises me by being even worse than I expected. Before watching Israel Horovitz’s feature directing debut, My Old Lady—an adaptation of his own stage play—I already had relatively low expectations. I like Maggie Smith, but she has a tendency to choose roles and scripts that are, at best, built around warm-and-fuzzy clichés. I hoped the Parisian setting and the presence of Kristin Scott Thomas might save an otherwise terrible script. Hint: they did not.
The film begins with our protagonist, Mathias (Kevin Kline), traveling to Paris following the death of his estranged father. Though the two had a troubled relationship, his late father left him a valuable apartment in the heart of Paris. As a failed, alcoholic writer without a penny to his name, Mathias intends to sell the apartment as soon as he arrives.
Stream, rent, or purchase My Old Lady via Amazon.
Naturally, things get complicated when Mathias discovers an old woman, Mathilde (Maggie Smith), living in his new apartment. He learns that his father acquired the property through an occupied viager. Under this arrangement, the buyer pays the seller a lifetime annuity while the seller retains the right to occupy the property until death. The French government’s explanation of the viager system confirms that the buyer does not take possession of an occupied property until the seller dies.
What Mathias has inherited is therefore not an apartment he can immediately occupy or sell, but the buyer’s side of an ongoing contract. He’s broke, cannot access the property’s value, and now owes Mathilde €2,400 every month until she kicks the bucket. His financial recovery quite literally depends upon the death of a woman he has just met. It is a wonderfully nasty premise—far more interesting than most of what the film eventually does with it.
Mathilde also lives with her daughter, Chloé (Kristin Scott Thomas), an English teacher involved in an affair with one of her students. Chloé and Mathias take a strong disliking to one another, and Chloé resents him for wanting to sell the apartment to a realtor who will likely throw her out and demolish the historic building upon her mother’s death. As Mathilde, Mathias, and Chloé pass the days with one another, dark secrets are revealed, forcing each of them to face their own demons and mortality.
The viager also turns inheritance into another expression of parental resentment. Mathias arrives believing that the apartment represents belated compensation from a father who failed him. Instead, he inherits another obligation, another connection to his father’s private life, and another reason to remain angry with a dead man. The property cannot be separated from the emotional damage surrounding it. Unfortunately, the film gradually reduces that complication to an assortment of confessions, revelations, and romantic contrivances. What begins as an unusually bitter examination of inherited guilt becomes a predictable story about wounded people learning to forgive one another.
Some stage plays adapt well to the screen; My Old Lady is not one of them. The problem is not simply that most of the film takes place inside an apartment. The Death of Louis XIV confines nearly all of its action to a dying king’s chambers but uses framing, duration, lighting, and physical detail to make that confinement intensely cinematic. Horovitz mostly points the camera at actors delivering dialogue.
Paris should have functioned as a character unto itself, with more attention paid to the city and the kind of life taking place beyond the apartment. Instead, it becomes an underused backdrop that explains the peculiarity of the viager arrangement. We spend most of our time inside, interrupted by the occasional drunken stroll along the Seine. Paris functions as prestige decoration, much as Versailles does in Jeanne du Barry, another French-set drama whose attractive surroundings cannot compensate for shallow character development. Nothing about My Old Lady feels especially French or Parisian.
However, the under-utilization of Paris is a small misstep when compared to the film’s most glaring issues. As previously stated, Horovitz stages the entire film like a play. Even worse, he directs his actors as if they are still performing in a theater. There’s nothing wrong with Maggie Smith’s performance per se; her part resembles most characters she has played in the last decade or two: a quick-witted older woman with strong opinions. Even some of her earlier work, like her performance in The Missionary, reflects a similar, albeit younger temperament. That said, she does deliver her lines with a certain melodramatic tone that feels out of place in a dark dramedy. In any case, Maggie Smith is not the main problem; it’s Kevin Kline.
First, I must admit that I am not a fan of Kevin Kline. He is well-respected among actors (or so I’m told), but I will never understand why. Yes, he attended Juilliard and has had a long and illustrious career on stage and screen. However, there’s something about his style of acting that always draws me out of the story. It feels disingenuous, forced, and overdone. In some ways, I think he was meant for the theatre. Every performance feels like he is trying to emote to a person sitting in the very last row.
Kevin Kline has never been more insufferable than he is in My Old Lady. The character, which feels like he was taken from every mediocre first draft ever devised, is already detestable. Mathias is a failed writer who drinks too much and has family issues; he waxes poetic in really unimaginative ways; he makes jokes that are meant to be witty and charming, but are actually awkward and pathetic; finally, his character arc could be immediately guessed by anyone who has seen a romantic comedy within the last 20 years.
To be fair, most of these problems are related to the script, not Kevin Kline. Unfortunately, Mr. Kline takes a terribly amateur character and makes him even worse. Every snide comment and drunken diatribe makes me feel like I’m watching a high school play, rather than a film with a budget and respected actors.
Speaking of respected actors, the antagonist-turned-love-interest (this is not really a spoiler as it can be deduced within the first 20 minutes of the film), Chloé, is played by Kristin Scott Thomas, a supremely talented actress. While her character is relatively two-dimensional from the start, she quickly devolves into something even worse: a childish, whiny imitation of Mathias. This would be fine if it made any sense, but it doesn’t. The change in Chloé’s attitude and general outlook on life is sudden and jarring. To add insult to injury, it is painfully obvious that this change was included to facilitate romantic feelings between Chloé and her newly discovered soulmate, Mathias.
More damaging is the way the screenplay packages parental neglect, alcoholism, infidelity, financial desperation, and decades of resentment into a tidy path toward romance. Mathias’ anger should complicate his relationship with the apartment and everyone connected to it. Instead, his pain becomes plot machinery. As the hidden relationships among the characters are explained, they increasingly feel like delivery systems for backstory rather than people with independent lives. This is where the film’s theatrical origins become most apparent—not in its limited locations, but in its reliance on revelations and explanatory speeches to manufacture emotional depth.
You may feel like I’m being too harsh, but it really is an unbearable film. It received a number of positive reviews when it first came out, for which I have no explanation. My Old Lady reeks of shallow pretension from start to finish. Obnoxious characters complement an obnoxious and predictable story. Strange tonal shifts make a supposed black comedy feel cumbersome at best. The chipper, perky music makes these shifts in tone even weirder. Finally, the mediocre theatre direction means that My Old Lady isn’t even entertaining as mindless cinema; on the contrary, it was an actual chore to finish the film. By the time the plot twists came into play, I had already lost interest in the storyline.
In short, if you appreciate stageplays that have been poorly adapted to film, terrible acting, poor character development, pretentious dialogue, and movies based in Paris that almost never show Paris, then My Old Lady is the perfect film for you.
My Old Lady (2014) Rating: ★ out of 5
If you’d still like to watch this movie, My Old Lady (2014) is currently available to rent, stream, or purchase via Amazon.