Warning! This post contains spoilers for Old.
Old movie ending and twists explained. M. Night Shyamalan is no stranger to movie twists and has been including them in his films since The Sixth Sense. The writer-director takes a somewhat different approach with Old as it’s more of a thriller and less of a traditional horror, which most of his past films have been. Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old utilizes its premise while adding plenty of plot twists and challenges the characters attempt to overcome.
The film follows Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), who take their kids, Trent and Maddox, on a resort family vacation. However, things take a drastic turn when they, and several other characters — Charles (Rufus Sewell) and his family, Jarin (Ken Leung), Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), and rapper Mid-Size Sedan (aka, Brenden, played by Aaron Pierre) — are invited to spend the day at a secluded beach. They soon discover the beach and its surrounding cliffs cause them to age one year every half hour. And there is no escape; if they attempt to leave through the caves, they get knocked out; if they try and swim around the cliffs to the other side, they drown. It's all a big mystery that the ending works to resolve.
Old ends with most of the characters dead. Some of them die from old age, while others drown or their physical ailments return. As it turns out, the resort isn’t at all what it seems to be; there’s something incredibly sinister happening behind the scenes that leads Guy, Prisca et al to the beach to begin with and it’s a twist that is certainly surprising and one that brings the plot of Old full circle. Here’s how the movie ended and the true reason behind the strange events.
Click here to watch Old: Ending Twist Explained on YouTube.
Why Anamika Resort Targeted Each Character In Old
One of Old’s key mysteries is why the characters were chosen to go to the reclusive beach to begin with. After all, there were several other people milling around the resort, but the hotel manager was very particular in who received special treatment. As it turns out, the one thing Prisca, Charles, Brenden (Mid-Size Sedan) and Patricia had in common were their medical diagnoses. Prisca had a benign tumor (which grew three sizes on the beach), Charles was schizophrenic, Brenden had a rare blood clotting issue, and Patricia was epileptic. The characters make the connection, but they can’t quite figure out why their medical histories are relevant to their resort vacation. The rest of the characters, family members of the ill, are merely collateral in Anamika’s plans; to have kidnapped the people with medical conditions only would have been far too suspicious, not to mention their families would’ve immediately picked up on their absence.
How Trent & Maddox Escaped The Beach
Idlib, the young nephew of the hotel manager in Old, enjoyed making codes for others to break. Luckily, Trent understood how to do it after spending some time with him at the resort. Losing Prisca and Guy was hard on Trent and Maddox and they were convinced they would die on the beach too considering how quickly time was flying and affecting their bodies. Idlib, knowing far more about the mysterious resort because of his proximity to it, knew his uncle hated the coral on the beach and put that into a coded message Trent was able to decipher the message just in time for him and Maddox to escape before the beach consumed them. The coral, for reasons unexplained, counteracted the effects of the cove’s rocks. Once Maddox and Trent were able to swim through the coral, they were free. The damage to their lives, however, had already been done and couldn't be reversed.
What Is The Relevance Of The Characters’ Occupations
At the start of Old, Trent and Idlib asked everyone they met their names and what they did for a living. At first, it seems random, an odd tidbit meant to showcase how enthusiastic and social the kids were. However, knowing each character’s occupation aided the audience in understanding how and why they reacted to their predicament in certain ways later on. Patricia, as a psychologist, wondered aloud if they were all experiencing shared psychosis or a collective side-effect of stress. Prisca’s job as a curator allowed her to know how long time had passed for the dead body to decay, which attributed to the math explaining how they aged one year every half hour. Perhaps the most important aspect of learning the characters’ occupations came at the end. If Trent never asked the young man vacationing what he did for a living, he wouldn’t have known he was a cop. The investigation into the resort probably wouldn’t have worked out so well or escalated so quickly without Trent’s information. This was a clever way for Shyamalan to work in a small, seemingly pointless detail and make it a crucial aspect of the story.
Warren Warren Pharmaceutical Plan (& Trial 73) Explained
The biggest twist, because Old is still a Shyamalan movie, comes at the very end when it’s revealed the resort is a front for the Warren Warren pharmaceutical company. The hotel manager is the head of a team of scientists who have been giving the characters with mental health and physical medical diagnoses unique cocktails that are actually experimental drugs. Prisca, Charles, Patricia, and Brenden were chosen specifically because of their ailments; on the beach, the scientists could monitor their health and see how the drugs are working over time. In the case of Patricia, the pharmaceutical employees considered it a win that she went 16 years (in beach time) without having a seizure.
It’s a shocking revelation, one that confirms the manager and his employees have been singling out individuals to die, sending them to the beach where the team can watch how the experimental drugs affect them over time and without their consent. While it’s unclear whether the resort was there before the pharmaceutical trials began, the manager makes note that the cove is a natural anomaly — one Shyamalan's film doesn't care to explain beyond that — and their work is to benefit mankind. To Warren Warren, sacrificing the few for the good of the many outweighs the moral and ethical issues surrounding the scientists’ work. The experiments themselves are relatively recent, however, with the group of people sent to the beach in the film labeled “Trial 73.” This indicates the 73rd time the tests have been run and, in beach cove time, that’s a little over two months.
The experiment critiques, albeit very slightly, the pharmaceutical and medical industries, where people’s lives are made to be less important than making money. Warren Warren employees can argue that they’re using the natural anomaly to advance medicine; drug testing that takes years to understand the full effects can now be done in a day’s time. However, the cost it has on people’s lives is tremendous and this is not including the fact the characters have absolutely no say in the matter. The scientists believe what they’re doing is just, but who is getting access to the drugs they’re testing at the end of the day? When health insurance and medicine is hard to obtain because of the costs, who is the experiment really benefiting if not the pockets of the pharmaceutical managers and CEOs? The film contemplates the repercussions of such selfish decision-making, especially when the costs outweigh everything else when gambling with people's lives.
How Old Compares To Graphic Novel (What’s Different)
A live-action adaptation of anything — be it a book, comics, or short story — is never going to follow its source material to the letter. To that end, Old is only inspired by Sandcastle. As such, Shyamalan takes great creative liberties with the film, even giving it an ending that is much different from the original work. While the premise of Sandcastle and Old are similar, both involving a group of people trapped on a remote beach who age rapidly, the latter has a big twist at the end that resolves a lot of the questions posed in the film.
Old sees Trent and Maddox, who grow to be in their 50s, escaping through the coral below the ocean’s surface, swimming past it and fleeing the detrimental effects of the beach. What’s more, they also manage to inform a police officer of what the resort has been doing, with the ending suggesting there will be serious legal repercussions to the testing the pharmaceutical company has been doing without consent. In the graphic novel, however, nobody makes it off the beach. In fact, Lévy decided against including a resolution because he felt it would have ruined the premise of Sandcastle.
The point of the story was for there to be no escape from the hell the characters were facing; Lévy also wanted to avoid having to explain the mystery altogether. What’s more, the child born on the beach to Trent and Kara, both of whom began as children, grows older alongside the other characters. In Old, the baby dies shortly after birth, turning to bones and dust not long after. Something the movie doesn’t explain is why some people drown. In Sandcastle, the reason is an invisible barrier they can’t get past, which knocks them out to prevent them from escaping (similar to the caves on the beach). Idlib, who helps Trent and Maddox without realizing, is shot in the graphic novel, a gruesome incident that is left out of the film. While Old obviously stands apart as its own thing, it's interesting to know what Shyamalan changed to make the film adaptation work and which aspects didn't make it into the film at all.