Editor’s Note: This article contains spoilers for Old.

Summary

  • Old is a chilling take on aging, mortality, and life, with a beach that causes rapid aging to anyone who occupies it.
  • The beach experiment is designed by a pharmaceutical company for accelerated clinical trials.
  • The bleak ending emphasizes the theme of time, mortality, and human nature.

M. Night Shyamalan's Old is basically an existential crisis put on film, and it's horrifying in every sense of the word. Even if you're not a fan of Shyamalan's gimmicky third-act twist that he's become so well-known for, there's no denying that Old is genuinely frightening in its own unique way, namely targeting the concept of aging, mortality, and life as a whole. The film follows groups of vacationing families invited to a secluded beach for a relaxing day of fun, only for it to turn into a complete nightmare when they start noticing that something isn't quite right with the picturesque beach. If they wander too far into the rocks, they pass out and seemingly respawn back on the beach with no recollection of doing so, and the children are noticeably older than when they first arrived at the beach. They soon realize that something about the beach is causing them to age rapidly. They don't know how, and they don't know why, but based on the growth rate of the children, they surmise that they're all aging about one year every 30 minutes. Every way they try to leave the beach causes them to pass out and end up right back on the beach where they started, leaving them hopelessly stuck, and rapidly aging, and thus quickly weakening.

As the movie goes on, it becomes clear that there are three intersecting mysteries. The first mystery is why a specific beach is causing people who inhabit it to age at a highly accelerated rate. The second mystery is why do people black out and end up back on the beach whenever they try to leave. The third mystery is why these people were specifically brought to this beach in the first place. To the film’s credit, the first two questions are answered throughout the story. The characters are aging rapidly because there’s something on this particular beach that causes cells to age at an accelerated rate. It doesn’t affect hair or fingernails because those are “dead cells”, but it can cause cuts to heal over and scar instantaneously or bones to gruesomely mend in a matter of seconds. This leads to some pretty gnarly body horror such as Chrystal's (Abbey Lee) famous death. She has hypocalcemia, meaning her body has an immense calcium deficiency, and so without her medication, later in the film, her bones begin to break and mend instantaneously in varying angles and positions, leaving her to die as a human pretzel. It's brutal. The reason for the blackouts has something to do with magnetism essentially causing an intense pressure similar to how someone who tried to reacclimate too quickly would pass out. Hence, why when we see Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre) walk into the rocks he immediately passes out, or when Kara (Eliza Scanlen) tries to climb up the mountain she gets disoriented and falls to her death. But the biggest mystery of all is why were these people specifically brought to the beach. Why were they targeted, and what is the infamous Shyamalan twist that awaits us in Old?

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Old
PG-13
Thriller
Mystery
Horror
Release Date
July 23, 2021
Runtime
108 minutes
Writers
M. Night Shyamalan, Pierre-Oscar Lévy, Frederik Peeters
Producers
Marc Bienstock, Ashwin Rajan, M. Night Shyamalan

Cast

See All

WHERE TO WATCH

Streaming

The Coral Is the Key in 'Old'

In the beginning of Old when the Cappa family first arrives at the Anamika resort, Trent (Nolan River) befriends Idlib (Kailen Jude). Trent and Idlib run all around the resort together, talking to guests and getting their names and occupations in a charming child-like manner. They also play a message-decoding game, using some secret language Idlib has made up and seemingly teaches to Trent. This becomes very important later. After everyone on the beach has died, leaving Trent (Emun Elliott) and Maddox (Embeth Davidtz) -- now middle-aged -- all alone, they decide to make the most of what time they have left and make a sandcastle. But they soon take notice of the coral, and Trent is reminded of his earlier games with Idlib, and searches through his notebooks for their messages. He finds a message from Idlib that says "My Uncle doesn't like the coral," and realizes that the coral might just be their clue to getting off the beach. They deduce that the coral must provide a shielding from the magnetism causing the blackouts, and decide to swim for it, only for Maddox to get tangled on a piece of coral. An employee (played by Shyamalan himself) presumes that the siblings have drowned when he doesn't see them resurface, and it's revealed that he's been watching them this entire time when he reports that all subjects of Trial 73 have perished, and packs up to return to base.

What Is the Trial in 'Old'?

It turns out that the resort, Anamika, is a front for a pharmaceutical company called Warren & Warren. They get patient information when people go to pick up their prescriptions, then they offer people a great rate for an alluring tropical getaway. Each of the people they invite has a medical condition of some sort. Prisca (Vicky Krieps) has an ovarian tumor, Charles (Rufus Sewell) has schizophrenia, his wife Chrystal has hypocalcemia, Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird) has epilepsy, and Mid-Sized Sedan has hemophilia. The rest of the occupants on the beach aren't necessarily a part of the experiment in the same way, but are brought on because they're related to the actual targets of the experiment. When the guests arrive, they are unknowingly fed a new drug through complimentary drinks upon arrival. The following day, they are then taken to the secluded beach where aging is accelerated. The purpose of all of this is that it allows Warren & Warren to basically speed through clinical trials. They note that an anti-seizure medication they gave to Patricia worked for eight hours, which was the equivalent of sixteen years. Thus, our characters are basically lab rats for Warren & Warren. Their existence can be erased (this part in particular seems silly because if entire families kept disappearing every time they went to this resort, it would probably raise a red flag or two), and Warren & Warren goes on testing out different drugs on different ailments on the time beach.

But even though some of the guests on the beach don't have any direct ailments, Warren & Warren do get to see the effects of human nature play out in a sort of speed run, like how Trent (Alex Wolff) and Kara end up getting pregnant when they reach puberty, and how Guy (Gael García Bernal) loses his eyesight as he ages, and Prisca loses her hearing. Warren & Warren think they've just had a major breakthrough with their latest trial and begin to celebrate their win, that is, until Trent and Maddox waltz into the resort. Turns out they did manage to untangle themselves from the coral and escape the beach, and they've brought with them a journal of a previous victim who recorded the names of other people during their time on the beach, which backs up Trent and Maddox’s story. They hand the journal to a cop who’s staying at the resort, he discovers it has names of missing persons, and the people at the resort are quickly arrested, as they had previously confiscated everyone who was a part of the trial's passports. Trent and Maddox then fly home, where they'll be sent to live with an aunt, who will likely be in for the surprise of her life to find that her nephew and niece are now full-grown adults.

'Old's Ending Is Bleak

Old doesn't have a particularly satisfying resolution simply because the film doesn’t really need it. For his part, Shyamalan told us that he always had this ending in mind because while the source material, the graphic novel Sandcastle, doesn’t include these events, he believes they were implied so he chose to make the implications literal:

“It was always this ending. For me, the graphic novel had no ending essentially, and didn’t explain anything. It had a few frames where they were insinuating something, so I kept writing that version of the story in my head. I go, ‘Oooh. That must mean that. That must mean there’s something else going on.’ So, to me, it was very much from the graphic novel like a painting that was unfinished, so the ending was from that. It was always that version. And there were different rhythms of how to convey that ending. And there were various versions of conveying that ending, but it was always that ending.”

While the idea of leaving Maddox and Trent on the beach would certainly reiterate the film's theme of time and mortality, it does that plenty throughout, and I think one of the film's most poignant scenes is when the siblings decide to build a sandcastle together. They know their time is coming to an end, and though their bodies are adults, their minds are still children, so the image of them building the sandcastle is heartwrenching, and really digs into the movie's overall bigger picture. But because it is an M. Night Shyamalan movie, a twist was to be expected, and as far as Shyamalan twists go, especially in recent years, Old's was pleasantly surprising. The entire time you're expecting the twist to just be something to do with the beach, and for the reveal to be some inane explanation for whatever is happening on the beach in true Shyamalan fashion. Instead, the ultimate twist is that we as humans are just kinda twisted, and that the real enemy of the movie is human nature, and how we so desperately try to meddle with time, and manipulate it. It may not be a twist that everyone enjoys, and sure, it would have been a lot more emotional and ambiguous had the twist been omitted, but it doesn't entirely throw the film off-kilter. It actually works in its own unique way.

One could argue that Shyamalan is making an ironic reveal here and that those who died on the beach had their lives cut short in favor of medical discoveries that would lengthen the lives of countless others. But again, is that utilitarianism of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few really what this movie was about? The emotional core of the film is really between Guy and Prisca and how the bitterness and enmity between them doesn’t really matter when time is short. In the end, all that really matters is the people you love, the importance of family, and making the most of the time you have with them. That has nothing to do with a nefarious pharmaceutical company that’s using people as unwitting participants in medical experiments.

Old is available to stream on Peacock in the U.S.

WATCH ON PEACOCK