The "Twist" In One of M. Night Shyamalan's Most Misunderstood Movies Isn't The Point
"The beach that makes you old" is a premise, not a surprise reveal.
The reveal in The Sixth Sense is one of the greatest twist endings in film history; it also might have trapped M. Night Shyamalan. Deemed a master of twists, every movie he's released since has been viewed through a twisty-turning lens — even the movies that don't really have a twist. This is especially an issue for Old, which celebrates its fifth anniversary today. The idea of Shyamalan's latest diabolical twist being "a beach that makes you old" got plenty of mocking, but that totally misses the point. "A beach that makes you old" isn't a twist. It's the premise, and if you can accept that, you can appreciate Old for the strange, beautiful story about mortality.
Released on July 23, 2021 in the midst of a mini-comeback of sorts for Shyamalan after a series of flops like The Last Airbender and After Earth, Old follows a group of tourists who are all visiting a tropical resort for vacation. Guy and Prisca (Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps) are on the verge of separating, and this trip is a chance to have one last experience together as a family with their young kids Trent and Maddox. A member of the resort staff tips them off to a secret beach along with a couple of other guests. Once they walk through a cave to get to the picturesque beach, strange things start to happen. They're rapidly aging at the rate of a year every half-hour. Trent and Maddox soon become teenagers played by Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie, though they still think like kids. The older beachgoers are rapidly declining and will perish soon, and every attempt they make to leave the beach is thwarted by various means. Body horror ensues as they speed-run the aging process.
There is a twist reveal in Old, technically, and to be fair it's kind of dumb. It turns out that one member of every group of guests trapped on the beach has some type of illness and the resort is a front for a pharmaceutical company that's using the beach's accelerated aging to conduct lifelong pharmaceutical trials in the span of a single day. (It is never explained why the beach makes people old; it just does that.) Looked at the right way, though, the silly and underwhelming reveal of the beach that makes you old's secret backstory is a feature, not a bug. Old is not actually about that beach. It's about the people on it, and the mechanics of how the beach ages people are essentially irrelevant to the emotions.
Being confronted with one's own mortality is one of the scariest and most universal things that can happen to a person. We all know, on some level, the time we have is limited; we mostly just try not to think about it because, hopefully, none of that's going to happen for a long time. But what if it wasn't so far off? The horror of Old comes from how cruelly the inevitability of mortality rushes at the beachgoers. Their bodies are changing — not in the normal, gradual way that you almost don't notice until it's already happened, but jarringly. Characters are missing out on the prime of their lives or, perhaps even more upsettingly, skipping their childhoods and being thrust, unprepared, into a warped version of adulthood.
The Cappa family in Old remembering the good old days.
And yet, beyond the bone-cracking and bloated bellies, there is a warmth to Old that makes the film a success. Shyamalan has always been a very earnest filmmaker; his best twists are not ones that are trying to trick the audience but that are using the unexpected to better bring out the feelings a story requires. By having its characters confront their mortality and, by the end, make a certain peace with it, Old invites its audience to consider doing the same. We're not on a spooky beach, thankfully, but the same is coming for us and wouldn't it be nice if we could meet it with grace? Old also invites us to make the best of the time we have. Guy and Prisca, who were on bad terms and about to separate, end up reconciling and dying, peacefully, of old age next to one another. In a sense, that's the ultimate happy ending for any couple.
Compared to most of Shyamalan's movies from the peak of his power, like The Village and Signs, Old is low-key. Boasting a modest budget, it never proclaimed to be a much-hyped cinematic event. Instead, it's more like a feature-length episode of The Twilight Zone. That iconic anthology series is also famous for twist endings, but like Shyamalan's filmography, The Twilight Zone is much more than twists. Many episodes didn't have twists at all. Instead, they just had a strange, often inexplicable premise that served as an opportunity to tell a story about humanity. Old is the same. It's about a beach that makes you old, yes, but it's really a beach that makes you think.
