The protagonists hug at the beach in M Night Shyamalan's Old
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Nicolas Ayala
Published 2 hours ago
Nicolas Ayala is a Senior Writer for the Comics team at ScreenRant, with over five years of experience writing about Superhero media, action movies, and TV shows.
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M. Night Shyamalan's Old could have had a better ending if it had followed its source material. Shyamalan is known for crafting mysterious thrillers built around bold premises and unforgettable plot twists. Because of his filmography, each new release comes with the expectation that it will both surprise and outdo his past work.
Old follows a group of vacationers who arrive at a secluded tropical resort and are offered access to a private paradise, only to discover that they age extremely fast while on the shore. Essentially, it's “a beach that makes you old.” Unlike most of Shyamalan's movies, however, Old is inspired by a 2011 graphic novel that has a different ending.
Sandcastle's Ending Hits Harder Than Old's
Sandcastle's Original Ending Is Far Creepier
Sandcastle's title gets explained in the 2011 graphic novel
Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy's Sandcastle, the 2011 graphic novel that inspired Old, is a haunting standalone horror story. The premise is unbelievably simple, but the presentation is relentlessly unsettling, as it leans heavily on psychological horror. Unlike the movie, Sandcastle is less concerned with answering why the beach works the way it does, and more about confronting the inevitability of aging and death without mercy or escape.
In the comic’s ending, one of the older men, Amesan, tells the story of a king who tries to outbuild death by constructing a massive fortress around himself, only to discover that all he was doing was building his own tomb. One by one, the cast dies of old age within mere hours. Sandcastle simply ends with the two children's middle-aged daughter building a sandcastle, echoing the king's fortress.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Old takes inspiration from the same setup, but its ending goes in a different direction entirely. In the film, the beach is revealed to be a secret testing site used by an unethical pharmaceutical company conducting experiments on unsuspecting families to fast-track drug research. Ultimately, the protagonists manage to escape by swimming away and expose the conspiracy to the authorities. While satisfying, the movie’s ending pivots toward traditional movie logic instead of existential horror.
Unlike Old's quickly-dying baby, in Sandcastle, the surviving “child,” a biologically grown woman with the brain of an infant, embodies the full tragedy of the story's themes of time stolen and life unlived. Even more unsettling is that the beach’s curse is never explained. The mystery makes the story far more haunting, whereas the movie’s sci-fi explanation assigns all the blame to an unambiguously evil company.
Old's Twist Teases A Bigger Movie The Audience Doesn't Get To See
Warren & Warren's Discovery Of The Beach Is A Distractingly Bigger Movie Than Old
The Warren & Warren scientists work behind the scenes of Old's beach
Old strongly suggests that the story audiences see is only a small piece of a much larger and far more complex narrative. Warren & Warren have known about the beach long enough to run dozens of experiments. The tourists we follow are “Trial 73,” meaning seventy-two previous human groups have already lived and died at accelerated speed. That alone suggests a bigger movie audiences never actually witness.
The film hints at a massive off-screen conspiracy involving the discovery of the beach, the moment Warren & Warren realized its horrific potential, the first experiments, the failures, and the logistical nightmare of luring desperate or unsuspecting vacationers to their deaths. Any of those stories could have been bigger films on their own. All of the secret science, the cover-ups, and the rest of the missing people are left to the imagination.
Old's Twist Raises More Questions Than Answers
Unlike Sandcastle, Old Opens The Door To Questions With No Answers
Old never explains why the beach accelerates time or how the victims pass out and instantly reappear when they try to escape. The Sandcastle graphic novel wisely avoids addressing the beach's background. By giving the horror an antagonist group, Old invites logical scrutiny that the story’s internal world simply can’t support.
Warren & Warren’s goals make no sense. The scientists can’t go to the beach to do any research on the test subjects, as organs decay hours after death. Data is limited to blood samples, and there is no control group. They have no way to know if medicines had any real or replicable effects.
Even more questionable is how this massive operation is completely unprepared for exposure. A single police officer shuts down a worldwide criminal conspiracy that has supposedly run dozens of human trials. Dozens of tourists disappearing in such a short span would draw international attention. Even without bodies, the resort would become a high-profile missing persons hub.
Old is The Kind Of Movie That Could Have Used A Typical Shyamalan Twist
Old's Core Mystery Deserved A Bigger Reveal
Malcolm leaning against a wall in The Sixth Sense
A beach that causes rapid aging is such a surreal, striking idea that audiences naturally expect the mystery to build into a massive payoff. Old's main concept is one of M. Night Shyamalan's wildest. It would have been logical for it to lead into a plot twist in the style of The Sixth Sense or The Village.
Old’s twist involving an evil pharmaceutical company feels surprisingly tame, especially considering Shyamalan’s reputation for shocking twists. The reveal only raises more logistical questions, and the facility is defeated almost immediately afterward. Ending such a bleak, tragic thriller on a rushed, strangely upbeat note robs the story of the haunting impact it could have had with a darker, more poetic final reveal.
6.0/10
6/10
Old
10 stars 9 stars 8 stars 7 stars 6 stars 5 stars 4 stars 3 stars 2 stars 1 star Like Follow Followed PG-13 Drama Horror Mystery Release Date July 23, 2021 Runtime 108 Minutes Director M. Night Shyamalan Writers M. Night Shyamalan, Pierre-Oscar Lévy, Frederik PeetersCast
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