Film / Old

Old is a 2021 American Body Horror thriller film written, directed, and produced by M. Night Shyamalan. It is based on the French-language Swiss graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters, which Shyamalan decided to adapt after receiving it as a Father's Day gift from his three daughters in 2017.

A family on holiday at a tropical resort is invited by the manager of the hotel they're staying in to a secluded beach alongside a group of other people. While they plan to relax at the beach for a few hours, their plans are thrown to the wayside as they slowly realize that the beach is somehow causing them to age rapidly, condensing the whole human lifespan into a single day.

The film stars Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps, with Rufus Sewell, Ken Leung, Nikki Amuka-Bird, Abbey Lee, Aaron Pierre, Alex Wolff, Nolan River, Embeth Davidtz, Eliza Scanlen, Emun Elliott, Kathleen Chalfant and Thomasin McKenzie in supporting roles. It was released on July 23, 2021, with shooting occurring over three months during the COVID-19 Pandemic in the Dominican Republic, making it Shyamalan's first film to be shot outside of Greater Philadelphia since his debut film, Praying with Anger.

Previews: Super Bowl TV spot, trailer.

Old provides examples of:

• Accents Aren't Hereditary:
  • Trent and Maddox both have American accents. Their parents Guy and Prisca do not (they have their actors' respective accents, Mexican and Luxembourgish).
  • Kara's mother is American, and her father is English. When she (rapidly) ages, she has an American accent.
• Adapted Out:
  • In the graphic novel, 5-year-old Zoe (now named Kara) had a 3-year-old brother named Felix. In the film, Kara is an only child.
  • Florence (Patricia) and Oliver (Jarin) are accompanied by science fiction writer Henry Lascaride, Florence's father. No such character exists in the film, aside from a science fiction writer being mentioned as one of the beach's previous occupants.
• Adaptational Modesty: The film has far less nudity than the source material - in the graphic novel, the children rapidly outgrow their clothing and spend a great deal of time in the nude. None of the children become visibly nude in the film, with their parents having luckily packed additional swimsuits for themselves that their children can now fit in; the nudity is limited to the rear ends of Chrystal and Mid-Size Sedan's skinny-dipping companion.
• Adaptation Name Change: Just about all the characters in the graphic novel had their names changed.
  • Louis and Sophie, the young brother and preteen sister, are now Trent and Maddox.
  • Zoe, the girl who experiences a rapid pregnancy and gives birth, is now Kara.
  • Robert is now Guy. He's married to Marianne (Chrystal) and he's Zoe (Kara) and Felix's father.
  • Zoe's mother, Marianne, is now Chrystal.
  • Prisca is Nathalie, she's Charles' wife and the grandmother (Agnes) daughter.
  • Florence and Oliver are now Patricia and Jarin.
• Adaptation Title Change: The movie is based on the graphic novel Sandcastle.
• Adorably Precocious Child: Trent and Maddox are pretty inquisitive and almost mature for their ages, which serves them well when they're the last ones left on the beach and are able to piece together clues on both what they have and deduction to escape.
• Affably Evil: Very affable, as it turns out. The scientists running the experiment have a minute's silence for their victims, have memorial plaques in their office, and celebrate the extraordinary victories their experiments afford them, such as saving thousands of lives. But they've still sent hundreds, and potentially thousands, of people to their horrible deaths, including children and whole families.
• Artistic License – Biology: Patricia wakes up almost immediately after her grand mal seizure at breakfast; normally one stays unconscious for some time after such a seizure. Additionally, she appears to have fully recovered by the time she and Jarin arrive at the beach. Whilst the amount of time between the seizure and their trip to the beach isn't mentioned, and Jarin says they rested at the hotel for a while, it can take a sufferer a minimum of one to two hours to fully recover from a grand mal.
• Artistic License – Medicine:
  • The Reveal that scientists are using the beach to run clinical trials at advanced speed is this in several ways. First, the sample sizes are way too small. Second, the beach itself would skew the trials—aging years in hours causes unnatural stress replicated nowhere else, plus there might be other, less obvious effects that can't be controlled for. The data would be absolutely no help in developing medications for people in the rest of the world.
  • An injury with a rusted implement is definitely cause for antibiotics and a tetanus shot, but no guarantee that it will explode into full blown sepsis.
• Bad Influencer: Chrystal is an online influencer married to a much older doctor, possibly just for his money, and doesn't seem to have a good word to say about anybody. However, downplayed, in that while she isn't of any use, she is shown to care genuinely for her daughter Kara and she really wasn't just being an annoying Granola Girl about her calcium deficiency.
• Bickering Couple, Peaceful Couple: Jarin and Patricia are the Happily Married peaceful couple, in sharp contrast to the divorcing Guy and Prisca, who bicker constantly until they realize how severe the situation is. Charles and Chrystal are in the middle, as they have a shallow but less obviously unhappy marriage.
• Bittersweet Ending: Unlike in the original comic, Trent and Maddox physically age to their 50s and the effects are irreversible, but they survive their time on the beach and manage to expose the resort to the authorities.
• Body Horror:
  • After Charles is infected by a rusted knife, the infection rapidly spreads through his body.
  • Chrystal breaks her bones numerous times, which then heal crookedly.
  • The poster demonstrates this, showing a woman in various states of aging, with her peeling back the skin on her leg to reveal bone.
• Break the Cutie: It's easier to count who doesn't suffer this:
  • Kara goes from being a sweet six-year-old to a teenage mother in a matter of hours, and she becomes scared when her father starts lashing out with a knife. She does a last-ditch attempt to get help by climbing the cliffs, but blacks out at a crucial time. It causes her death.
  • Trent forms a bond with a kid named Idlib, while Maddox tries to comfort him as their parents fight in their hotel room. He hits puberty in a matter of hours, impregnates the girl he comes to love by accident, and has a breakdown when their baby dies after a few seconds of crying. Then his parents die in front of him and his sister, and all they can do is try to find any clue that would get him and Maddox off the beach. While he says he's more worried about how his aunt will react, he reveals to the new guests that he lost his parents and Kara by manipulation.
  • Ironically, Idlib is the only non-aged character that suffers this. He had given Trent and Maddox a page of codes two days before, and had been surprised when Trent wanted to be friends with him. Then the rapidly aged Trent and Maddox reappear; they confirm their identities by producing the same page which is waterlogged but noticeably the same. Idlib's face screws up in pain and anguish, realizing he just lost the two new friends who were nice to him.
• Chekhov's Gun: A few.
  • The hotel manager's nephew showing Trent his symbols. He says it's like a game of spies, trying to decode the message. Turns out one particular note, when decoded from those symbols, tells him and his sister that his uncle "doesn't like the coral". That secret language allowed Trent and his sister to swim through the coral reef to escape.
  • Guy notices (and even points out) the "beautiful coral" in the water. It is the method of escaping the beach that Trent and Maddox use in the end.
  • When Trent tries to pick up some items scattered along the beach (in particular a rusted butter knife), Prisca tells him to put it down and that if he got cut, he'll get an infection. This crosses into Foreshadowing when Prisca uses that same knife to kill Charles during one of the latter's schizophrenic episodes. And he does get a fast spreading sepsis infection from that cut.
  • Chrystal claiming to have a calcium deficiency in the restaurant initially comes across like she's just being snooty and demanding. Turns out she really does, to horrifying results.
• Chekhov's Gunman: When Trent asks three guests about their occupations at the start of the film, one identifies himself as a police officer. After Trent escapes the beach with evidence of the resort's nefarious activities, he gives the evidence to the police officer, allowing for the resort staff to be arrested.
• Children Are Innocent: Trent immediately befriends the shy Idlib, revealed to be the manager's nephew, and says they're friends now. When Idlib sadly says he doesn't have friends, Trent promises to facetime him and they'll go to college together. Idlib ends up saving Trent and Maddox by passing on a page of coded messages to him.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Trent and Kara go from playing on the beach together as six year olds to falling in love and conceiving a child as teenagers. The beach’s rapid aging effects means this all happens in a matter of hours.
• Closed Circle: The characters' attempts to leave the beach cause them to mysteriously black out and wind up back into the center of the secluded area. When Kara attempts to scale the rock, she suddenly blacks out and falls, and when Jarin attempts to swim to freedom, he drowns from blacking out in the water, a fate that apparently befell Mid-Size Sedan's companion when she went for a swim.
• Composite Character: Trent seems to be a combination of Louis and Felix from the graphic novel. Also, in a way, Crystal could be a combination of both Marianne (Zoe, Kara in the movie, mother) and Nathalie (Charles' wife).
• Creator Cameo: Shyamalan plays a hotel employee who drives everyone to the beach and secretly monitors them.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: While most of the characters don't have particularly pleasant fates, the worst goes to Chrystal, whose bones repeatedly break and contort until she mercifully expires.
• Death by Adaptation: Zoe/Kara and Louis/Trent's baby is the last surviving person on the beach at the end of the comic, though in the body of a 50 year old and will inevitably age to death as well. In the movie their child dies as soon as it's born.
• Death of a Child: Kara and Trent's baby dies shortly after being born due to the beach's conditions, while Kara herself also dies.
• Death Wail: Trent when he finds Kara’s body.
• Didn't Think This Through: One of the scientists complains about mixing patients with mental and physical conditions, as Charles murdering one of the subjects prematurely screwed up their trial on his condition.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Everyone who tries to swim out has this attitude. They reason that they're going to die anyway, but if they at least try, then they can get help rather than wait for death to come to them. Trent remembers what Idlib said about his uncle not liking the coral and realizes it has to be the only way out.
• Dwindling Party - one by one the characters die from various causes (and not just aging) until only the two main characters are left.
• Emotional Maturity Is Physical Maturity: Inverted.
  • The children gain maturity as they age, even though they hardly have time to learn those behaviors. For example, Kara shows some maturity when she tries to leave by scaling the rocks. Her main reason being that she wants to get her dad out of there because he has become too dangerous. This isn’t something a six-year-old would be thinking.
  • The main family at least seems to mature as rapidly as they age. While everyone else dies from panic-induced behavior, sanity slippage, or medical complications, Guy and come to realize how pointless the source of their marital issues were, not even remembering what they were in the first place (possibly because of dementia) and make peace before death. By the next day, Trent and Maddox (now in their fifties) have also made peace with their situation even though they were 6 and 11 respectively only a day ago. Even when they make their attempt to escape, they remain calm all the way to the end of the film. When all is said and done, Trent is more concerned with how his aunt feels about her niece and nephew being older than her than his ordeal.
• Evil Brit: The main antagonist on the beach is Charles who has a stereotypical English name and speaks with a clipped RP English accent. However the Greater-Scope Villain is the American pharmaceutical company, and it is their trial that exacerbates Charles' schizophrenia.
• Express Delivery: Kara (one of the rapidly aging children) ages into a teenager, winds up pregnant, and then swiftly delivers.
• Fan Disservice:
  • Mid-Size Sedan's companion is an attractive woman who goes skinny-dipping, which initially seems titillating. The same woman's nude body washing up the next day bloated and decomposing is significantly less so.
  • Thomasin McKenzie spends all of her screentime wearing only bikinis, and the first time the audience sees her is from the back. However, her character is only eleven years old mentally speaking, and the fact her body keeps on aging kills the appeal even more.
  • As Chrystal ages throughout the day, her skimpy bikini gradually changes from Fanservice to this.
• Fauxshadow: Various lingering camera angles, and conversations imply that Maddox and Mid-Sized Sedan were going to hook up. This never happens because Sedan, real name Brendon, is killed by Charles before the mid point of the film.
• Foreshadowing: There is so much of this in the movie that you'll notice a lot of Rewatch Bonus moments:
  • When the family first arrives in the resort, a staff member comments on how young the children are. This foreshadows the resort being aware of the beach's effects.
  • When convincing Guy and Prisca to visit the beach, the manager describes the visit as a "once-in-a-lifetime" opportunity. He didn't mean that in an opportunistic way, he meant that literally. Everyone who had visited the beach died on it, thus having visited it only once.
    • The movie has numerous puns regarding age and time in its beginning, but they are less of a Rewatch Bonus and more on the verge of being an Overly Long Gag, especially since (unlike the manager) most of the characters who talk about aging and the passage of time aren’t aware of the beach’s effects, instead they just so happened to be talking about that at that very moment. Besides, the trailer and even the One-Word Title establish that the movie revolves around abnormal aging and passage of time.
  • Chrystal gives Kara advice on her posture to prevent her from becoming hunched over in the future, and constantly mentions calcium during the breakfast scene. It turns out that Chrystal has a bone condition that causes her to become hunched without calcium, which leads to her breakdown and eventual death.
  • Guy remarks to the van driver that they have been given a massive amount of food. They turn out to need it (or at least most of it) after all, as the kids start to increase in body mass and therefore need the extra energy.
  • One of the first things the family finds on the beach are various items from eyeglasses to cell phones just lying in the sand, clearly all that's left of the last poor souls who ventured here.
  • One of the items Trent finds in the sand is a rusted butter knife. His mother tells him to put it down, saying that he'll get a cut that will be infected. She winds up using that the same butter knife on Charles during his schizophrenic episode, and he suffers a fast-spreading sepsis infection.
  • Trent offhandedly comments to his mother that his shorts are starting to feel tight. That tends to happen when one is growing at an accelerated rate.
  • Charles grows in paranoia and becomes more erratic in movement while on the beach, lashing out with a pocketknife for seemingly no reason. This alludes to him having a mental illness, specifically schizophrenia.
  • When you put the pieces of the puzzle together, you realize that all the couples and families have one thing in common: they each have at least one member that suffers from an illness of some sort. It gives you the idea that the guests aren't picked out of luck but are selected for something more sinister.
  • Guy jokes with his kids that children are not allowed on the beach. Turns out to be true, after a fashion.
• Hand Wave:
  • It's never explained why the beach has this rapid aging effect. Even the scientists using it can't come up with any rational explanation for it but are content to use it for their own experiments.
  • It’s also never explained why Sedan seems to have started aging only when the others arrived at the beach.
  • The blackouts while trying to leave the beach are explained as the difficulty the body has with adapting to the sudden change in aging rate. However they suffered no ill effects from entering the beach, even though intuitively one would expect a sudden speed-up in aging would be more stressful than sudden slow-down.
• Healing Factor: One of the side-effects of the rapid aging is that wounds and cuts heal almost instantly, as the body's natural healing factor is rapidly sped up. Which becomes a major issue when the characters need to remove a tumor from Prisca — and when they try to counteract this by holding the flesh open, it starts healing around their fingers.
• Hidden Depths: Mid-Size Sedan seems to realize they're all trapped on the beach together. He gives some insight to Maddox, a big fan of his rapping, that he came here to feel more connected to the ocean, and to nature. Maddox repeats this to herself when she ends up in her twenties.
• Hollywood Old: Particularly noticeable considering that all the adults' actors stay the same (unlike the kids, who are recast as they age). As a result, Prisca tells Guy that he has noticeable wrinkles when there aren't any visible on his face, the ageing effects are of different speeds and much more variable, and it's mainly noticeable once the characters' hair goes gray that they're supposed to be elderly.
• Hypochondria: Chrystal appears to have this at first, constantly yammering on about a calcium deficiency during breakfast that no one really thinks she has. Subverted - she actually does have a calcium deficiency, and it becomes a plot point.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Justified with Trent and Maddox, whose younger ages allow them more time to find a way off the beach.
• Insane Equals Violent: Charles has a mysterious mental illness which may be schizophrenia. Even when his condition is less severe, he quickly begins threatening Mid-Sized Sedan with a knife, and quickly escalates into trying to kill him and then everyone else on the beach.
• Insurmountable Waist-High Fence: while not strictly "waist high", the manner in which the beach is surrounded by obstacles and blackouts when trying to overcome them is reminiscent of a computer game trying to force you down the intended route.
• I Owe You My Life: Trent and Maddox show Idlib without words that he saved them from dying on the beach by giving his coded message to Trent the day before. Idlib realizes who they must be, and his face screws up in anguish realizing that he lost new friends just after meeting them.
• Irony: Despite the rapid aging of the main characters, only three of them die of old age (Agnes, Guy and Prisca). Everyone else who died did so trying to escape, through their pre-existing condition, or was murdered.
• I Want My Mommy!: When the changes start happening, Maddox and Trent hug their parents and say that they're scared.
• Laser-Guided Karma: The hotel manager has subjected our main characters to have their lifetimes slowly and painfully stolen from them by the beach's Rapid Aging effect, on top of suffering their respective medical conditions at a frightening rate and dying miserable deaths. (Not to mention countless others before them who were subject to this cruel fate as well). He gets his due in the end when Trent and Maddox (two children whose bodies were primed for swimming by age) not only show up unexpectedly at his hotel after being presumed dead, but turn in evidence of his unethical practices to the police authority.
• Lighter and Softer: While no less dark than the comic, it ends on a more hopeful but bittersweet note with Trent and Maddox escaping the beach, allowing the authorities to know about the illegal experiments there. The comic ended with the deaths of all characters except the now-aged baby and no hope that things were going to change.
• Male Gaze: The camera lingers on Maddox's thankfully full grown butt right before The Reveal.
• Mama Bear: The group discusses if one of them could scale the cliffs and avoid the blackout effect. Trent volunteers to try since his body is big and strong enough. Prisca vetoes it; she says at that height, if he blacked out, then the fall would kill him. She forbids him from trying the cliff as his mother.
• May–December Romance: Charles is noticeably a lot older than Chrystal (Rufus Sewell is twenty years older than Abbey Lee).
• Meaningful Name: The Anamika Resort has a slightly sinister origin in its name, as in Hindi, Anamika means "without a name". Kinda suspicious for a reputable resort to essentially be nameless.
• Miss Conception: Kara thinks she just got "a little bit fat" when she becomes pregnant. This is justified, however, since she is mentally six years old and presumably hasn't been given The Talk. Trent at least knows where babies come from (in theory), but thought that people had to do it "ten times" in order to get pregnant.
• Ms. Fanservice: Chrystal spends most of the film in a skimpy bikini that reveals her posterior. Once her aging becomes pronounced and the lack of calcium starts to affect her bones, that quality is lost and she desperately tries to conceal herself.
• Mundane Utility: An example that is both practical and utterly horrifying; the beach's outright supernatural aging effect is used by a facility to perform fast-forwarded drug trails.
• My Greatest Failure: During their last moments together, Guy shares that he feels this way about he and Prisca's failing marriage. After everything they've been through in the span of one day alone, Guy can't help but feel their marital problems were insignificant and he should've tried harder to save their marriage.
• Never Trust a Trailer:
  • In one of the trailers, the viewers are led to believe that the rapid aging effects of the beach will cause Charles' body to start decomposing while he's still alive. In the movie, it turns out the dark lines in his skin are from a rapidly spreading sepsis infection.
  • The trailers also show the kids—at different ages—repeat the phrase "We never leave each other. Nothing separates us." which implies that they would be the film's Arc Words. They are never spoken in the theatrical cut of the movie and the coded message they find on the beach does not have those words but a different message altogether.
• No-One Could Have Survived That: M Night Shyamalan watches the coral for just a minute and a half before assuming Trent and Maddox have drowned and leaving. Of course they haven't.
• Oh, Crap!: The hotel manager when Trent and Maddox show up at the resort, alive and well, with the evidence needed to expose the resort's actions.
• One-Word Title: Old.
• Only Sane Woman: Patricia tries to be this. When everyone realizes that they can't leave the beach, she tries to calm them down when Charles starts accusing Mid-Size Sedan of drowning his girlfriend, saying that there has to be a logical explanation. Unfortunately, psychologists' training didn't have a scenario for Rapid Aging.
• Oppose What You Suffered: The African-American policeman Mitchel immediately helps Trent and Maddox, no questions asked. Considering his family's likely history of slavery as well as the more recent Tuskegee medical experiments on African-Americans it's not surprising that everybody on the beach having been exploited and effectively enslaved for medical experimentation touches a nerve and prompts Mitchel to quick action.
• Outliving One's Offspring:
  • Due to Kara dying from her cliff fall, both Charles and Chrystal end up outliving her - although neither particularly notices because of their medical conditions worsening.
  • Ironically, Kara outlives her own offspring, as her baby dies shortly after birth.
• Pet the Dog: Charles and Chrystal dote on Kara for all their shallowness. When Kara starts to grow rapidly, Chrystal gets her changed into a spare swimsuit and comforts her through the delivery of her baby.
• Precision F-Strike: Guy calls himself a "fucking coward" when telling Prisca he should have done more to save their marriage.
• Predatory Big Pharma: The beach is revealed to be run by an American pharmaceutical company, who are using it in an experiment to figure out how to reverse ageing. The specific scientists are shown to be extremely affable, but the scheme has conspired in the deaths of many people.
• Rapid Aging: The whole plot of the film revolves around the beach causing everyone to age one year for every half hour they spend there. A 6-year-old Kara finds herself aging into a teenager in a matter of hours, Trent has his voice deepen over the course of a conversation, wrinkles suddenly sprout on Guy's face, and the body of a woman who seemingly just died has quickly decomposed into a skeleton (it's stated that it would take the body about seven years to do so naturally).
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The police officer. When Trent flags him down at the hotel and presents him with the notebook, he leaps into action right away, confirming that the names in the notebook all belong to missing persons and aiding in the investigation into the drug company. He also escorts Trent and Maddox home, showing that he believes that they are who they say they are.
• Remembered Too Late: Zig-zagged. The hotel manager’s nephew gives Trent an encoded message the morning everyone goes to the beach, but Trent only remembers it the following morning, when only he and Maddox are still alive (and in their fifties). It helps them to escape, however, once Trent decodes it.
• Roadside Surgery: Surgeon Charles uses this to excise Prisca's rapidly growing tumor.
• Rule of Symbolism: The ticking sound in the trailer brings to mind a clock, referencing the passage of time and the rapid aging.
• Running Gag: A rather tragic one, but Charles' mental issues tend to manifest as him suddenly asking if anyone remembers the name of a movie that starred Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. (It's The Missouri Breaks if you're curious).
• Sanity Slippage: As time wears on, Charles gradually loses his grip on sanity and degenerates into incoherent ramblings and violence. Justified since he is later revealed to have schizophrenia that rapidly advances due to the beach's influence.
  • Chrystal also suffers from this, though not as severely as her husband. Her panic begins very early and only gets worse when she starts to visibly age, after which she frantically tries to cover herself and ultimately flees to a cave. Matters are made worse by the pain her condition brings on, and by the time Trent and Maddox find her in the cave, she is an utter wreck, saying how it hurts to move her body and screaming for them not to look at her.
• Skewed Priorities: Trent and Maddox recognize their increasingly dire predicament of having seemingly no way to escape the beach, aging quickly all the while. They decide to keep trying... but pause to build a sandcastle.
• Something Only They Would Say: At first, Guy and Prisca don't recognize their kids. Then Trent and Maddox hug them, and say they're scared. Prisca's expression goes to Oh, Crap! when she realizes Trent nearly reaches her height.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Trent and Maddox find a notebook that was left behind by one of the beach's previous inhabitants, an aspiring science fiction author. The man is no longer living, and the audience does not even learn his name, but because he was trying to make sense of what was happening and had the good sense to write down the names and addresses of the people in his group, Trent and Maddox are able to present proof to the police and the drug company gets taken down.
• Sociopath: A moment of silence is a very hollow gesture for a group of people who are willing to send 10 people to an excruciating and horrifying death. Particularly since they were only actually studying three of them. In other words they sent seven people to be collateral damage in a dubious experiment at best. Special mention goes to the van driver played by M Night Shyamalan who doesn’t even seem slightly fazed that he’s sending three children to a horrific death and casually watches from a cliff.
• Spanner in the Works: Trent and Maddox are able to leave the beach alive (if greatly aged) because the hotel manager's nephew gave them a clue about how swimming through the underwater coral passage would allow them to escape without blacking out. If it hadn't been for him, both kids would've eventually died of old age like the rest of the characters, and the Hotel Manager would've gone on carrying out his experiments on more unsuspecting guests.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In the original graphic novel, no one on the beach survives the unexplained Rapid Aging. In the film, siblings Trent and Maddox manage to escape.
• Spiritual Successor: Sometimes regarded as this to Shyamalan's The Happening, with a similar "unexplained natural phenomenon kills people" premise, a focus on a central family group attempting to escape said phenomenon alongside groups of colorful and expendable strangers, Science Is Bad themes and some Narm-y dialogue that wouldn't feel out of place in The Happening. Arguably the biggest difference is that Old is PG-13 while Happening was famously marketed as being R-rated.
• Statuesque Stunner: Chrystal, who's taller than even most of the male members of the group.
• Surprise Pregnancy: Kara ages into a teenager and winds up pregnant.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • A middle-aged Jarin attempts to swim around a distant rock formation against a strong current to get off the beach. His body washes ashore, and the group discerns that he must have blacked out while swimming due to the beach's strange energetic barrier.
  • As they age, Guy's vision blurs and Prisca goes deaf in one ear. Because of their diminished senses, neither of them notices Charles with the knife until it's too late.
• Sympathy for the Devil: Calling Charles a "devil" is a bit of a stretch, but Prisca sympathizes with him despite having to kill him to protect Guy, knowing that he was as much a victim as the rest of them.
• This Is Gonna Suck: In the midst of everyone preparing for hers and Trent's baby's birth, Kara has this attitude when she suspects birthing a child isn't going to be a simple or painless procedure. And it doesn't make it any less heartbreaking that she expresses this revelation in the only way a mental six-year-old can:
  Kara: I'm scared! I'm scared!
• Tick Tock Terror: The music for the trailer features the unnerving sound of a ticking clock that starts up once the protagonists realize that they are rapidly aging.
• Token Good Teammate: Due to being a child, Idlib doesn't understand that his uncle's resort is not supposed to be nice and there's a reason he's not allowed to befriend the guests. His brief friendship with Trent allows him and Maddox to escape when he passes on a page of codes.
• The Topic of Cancer: Prisca reveals to Maddox that when she found out about the tumor, and it was benign she freaked out and started an affair. It turns out that Guy was deciding whether or not they should divorce, and the trip was their last hurrah.
• Tragic Stillbirth: Downplayed. Charles has untreated schizophrenia, and he fears that getting any treatment will out him and discredit his career as a cardiac surgeon and chief of medicine. Then his daughter rapidly gets pregnant and gives birth child, who dies seconds after birth, while Chrystal is screaming for him to help.
• Trailers Always Spoil: The various trailers/advertisements gave away the deaths of Charles, Kara, Patricia, and Jarin. Breaking down the trailers would also reveal footage of Trent and Maddox as adults.
• Trauma Conga Line: Just about everyone goes through this during their time on the beach, but special mention goes to Kara. Her grandmother suddenly died, she grew into a teenager, involuntarily had sex with Trent, went through a rapid pregnancy and childbirth, had to watch their child pass away moments later, witnesses her father start to go through a mental decline, and ultimately dies when she tries to escape by scaling the rocks. And this all happened within a matter of hours. That is way too much for a (mentally) six-year-old to go through.
• The Unreveal: While the twist explains why the characters are on the beach, the conspirators have absolutely no idea why or how the beach does what it does. To them it is an unexplainable phenomenon that they decided to make use of.
  • However, Maddox and Trent discover a notebook left over by a science fiction writer who was previously on the beach, and he theorised that the rocks facing the beach were submerged beneath the ocean for millions of years, almost at the point of reaching the magnetism of Earth, carrying strange minerals that cause cells to age at an abnormally rapid pace.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: The group that runs the resort the characters visit is actually a team of scientists who lure people with medical conditions to the beach knowing they will die and secretly give them experimental medicines for said conditions to speed up the testing progress, reducing clinical trial time to a mere day thanks to the beach's rapid aging effects and allowing them to produce these medicines faster for those who need them. They recognize that the reality of the situation is harsh, but believe that it will ultimately save millions of lives.
• Within Arm's Reach: When being attacked by the violent Charles, Guy reaches out and grabs a handful of sand, which he then throws in Charles's face. It temporarily blinds him, allowing him to get the upper hand.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: After Jarin's death by drowning, Patricia wraps herself in pool noodles and prepares to swim for it, only to drop dead from her seizure condition. The pool noodles, a very real solution to the problem of passing out in the water, are never mentioned before or again, though it stands to reason the current would just wash the unconscious person back onto the beach.