Old ending explained: Unravelling M Night Shyamalan's mysterious thriller
Old ending spoilers follow.
M Night Shyamalan's latest thriller Old is bonkers. But unlike some of his previous pictures, which hinge on a late-in-the-day twist making you reassess everything you've just seen, it's surprisingly upfront about its premise.
Based on Sandcastle, the 2010 graphic novel by Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy, the movies follows two families, a middle-aged couple and a young man, who find themselves trapped on a secluded beach that's causing them to age so rapidly, it threatens to reduce their whole lives to a single day.
While Shyamalan's more mysterious movies tend to set up – or at least hint at – the 'why?' before letting their oblivious audiences in on exactly what's been going on, Old does the opposite. It leaves you guessing until its final act – and even then it refuses to give you all the answers.
Before we can go into how it ends, though, we need to take things back to the beginning and head into some major spoilers, so look away now if you haven't seen Old.
Related: M Night Shyamalan says new movie Old is like "nothing else"
Specifically, the thriller follows risk analyst Guy (Gael García Bernal) and museum curator Prisca Capa (Vicky Krieps), a married couple trying their best to keep their impending separation a secret from their two children; 6-year-old Trent and preteen Maddox.
They do plan on telling them eventually (Prisca has already met someone else and sorted out a new place for herself outside of the family home); they just want to give them one last memory-filled vacation first. The trip does turn out to be one the youngsters will never forget, too, but not at all in the way their parents had intended.
Shortly after arriving at their idyllic holiday resort, precocious littl'un Trent (Nolan River) befriends a sweet boy named Idlib (Kailen Jude), who seems to live at the hotel and is often seen being bossed about by its manager Nils (Gustaf Hammarsten). When the twosome aren't together, they spend their time solving coded messages they've written to one another as it "makes them feel like spies" and the fact that they do this will prove important – and oh-so-convenient – later on.
During breakfast, the Capas are approached by Nils and asked whether they'd be interested in a visit to a nearby private cove. They say yes, he agrees to make arrangements and a little while later, they're on a bus waiting to be ferried away. Before they set off, another clan hops onboard: doctor Charles (Rufus Sewell), his younger, glamourous wife Chrystal (Abbey Lee), their 6-year-old Kara, and Charles' mother Agnes (Kathleen Chalfant).
Having been driven to the bay by an unnamed van driver (Shyamalan), the gang pass through an imposing cavern, emerge onto a sandy enclave and are uneased when they spot a young man sitting silently by the rock face. Nevertheless, they set about chilling, but the calm swiftly turns into chaos when Trent stumbles across a dead woman and a frantic Charles suggests that the man – who Maddox points out is actually a famous rapper called Mid-Sized Sedan – killed her.
Related: M Night Shyamalan defends controversial Glass ending twist
After another couple, nurse Jarin (Ken Leung) and seizure-prone therapist Patricia (Nikki Amuka-Bird), rock up, the adults come to the horrifying realisation that the children have grown significantly while they've been bickering over the body. Trent and Kara are now preteens, while Maddox is a teenager. Agnes has developed serious breathing problems, and the deceased? Well, they've decomposed.
Prisca, using knowledge she's gained from work, deduces that time is passing more quickly on this beach and that none of them will last longer than 24 hours, so they best get the hell out of Dodge. There's just one problem… Every time any of them try to pass back through the cavern, they get splitting headaches and find themselves inexplicably plonked back out into the open.
Trapped, hysteria starts to set in and tensions rise as Charles, succumbing to his advancing schizophrenia, starts physically lashing out at the other holidaymakers. Elsewhere, the kids have another growth spurt with Hereditary's Alex Wolff, Jojo Rabbit's Thomasin McKenzie and Little Women's Eliza Scanlen taking over as Trent, Maddox and Kara, respectively.
Chrystal starts obsessing over her appearance, while Guy notices he's losing his eyesight and Prisca undergoes an emergency surgery due to the tumour she was recently diagnosed with quadrupling in size almost in an instant. Trent and Kara sleep together, confused by their sudden rush of hormones, and wind up pregnant and Kara gives birth just minutes after doing the deed. (Bear with us.)
A number of deaths follow, including the newborn baby, Kevin (stabbed repeatedly by Charles), Jarin (who tries to swim around the rocks but drowns in the process), Kara (having attempted to climb up the cliffs, only to blackout and plummet to the ground) and Patricia, from a particularly nasty fit. But Old leans fully into body horror when, come nightfall, Trent and Maddox discover a hunchbacked Chrystal hiding in a cave.
Petrified by the thought of them seeing her aged self, she tries to drop a boulder on her head, but misses and breaks her arm. With time moving much faster than usual, her broken bones meld back together in the wrong place, and as she throws herself against the walls off a narrow tunnel, hobbling towards the siblings, the same thing happens to her other limbs, causing her to eventually pass away from the injuries.
Outside, Charles attacks Guy in his confused state. Realising that Guy can barely see, Prisca throws herself in between the two men before grabbing a rusty knife in the sand and slashing Charles on the arm, noting how the infection from the wound should ravage his body right away. As his skin blisters, he falls to the ground in pain and dies.
As the dawn approaches, the Capas cuddle together as Guy leans into a near-deaf Prisca and asks, "Were we fighting?". She nods and smiles in response, which prompts him to joke about how he can't remember why and how glad he is that they're all together. He falls backwards and passes on, before Prisca walks towards the seafront and expires herself.
It seems worth noting here that, in the source material, all of the people perish after seeing "the hotelier's son" José get gunned down while running towards them, and later falling asleep that first evening.
Before they pop their clogs in the original graphic novel though, one of the strangers tells the others the story of a King who was so afraid of death, he spent years trying to avoid it, only to realise that his fear had consumed him so much he'd essentially let his life pass him by anyway.
Old touches on those themes fleetingly within the above scene, but it's evident Shyamalan is more fussed about shocks and wrapping things less allegorically than that, particularly as the film moves into more Hollywood-ised territory…
So, the following morning, Maddox (now played by Matilda's Embeth Davidtz) and Trent (Game of Thrones star Emun Elliot), realising they haven't got much time left, vow to keep searching for a way out of the cove until they physically can't anymore, before mutually deciding they should make a sandcastle together first.
While they're sculpting away on the seafront, Trent reveals that he hasn't had a chance to check out the last cryptic message Idlib gave him. "Decode it," Maddox encourages him as he runs off to fetch the piece of paper from his bag.
A few minutes later, he returns to his sister to read out the note. "My uncle doesn't like the coral," he says, acknowledging a nearby reef. Deducing that Idlib was trying to give them a clue about how to escape the beach, Trent suggests that they swim out to the patch of coral and see whether there's anything unusual about it.
Maddox agrees and the pair head into the water. The movie then reveals that they are being watched, as it cuts to a guy – Shyamalan's van driver – peering at them through a telescope from the cliff's edge.
Satisfied they've drowned after seeing them submerge themselves and swim into the coral but never resurface, he rings someone and explains that the last remaining "subjects" have died. The receiver of the call seemingly resists his claims at first, but after he reminds them that "the last person who made it out" died shortly after anyway, they tell him to pack up and return to the retreat.
Unknown to the lookout, however, Trent and Maddox did manage to pass through the coral unscathed – if you discount almost running out of breath due to a tense, underwater cardigan snag – and they're on their way back as well.
In the next scene, hotel manager Nils can be seen walking down into some underground facility, and asking one of the lab coat-wearing technicians there how the experiment went.
Visibly restraining himself, the excited worker informs the room that it was a triumph and that they have successfully learned how to treat people with severe epilepsy. (Turns out, Patricia went the longest she'd ever gone without having a seizure on the beach before she was struck down by that fatal one.)
And well, that's it, that's the reveal: the hotel is a front and the people that work there are selecting unwitting tourists with existing health issues, subjecting them to research trials, and relishing the fact that they don't have to wait months or years to see whether their work generates positive (or sometimes negative) results.
It's a pretty tame one compared to The Sixth Sense's mind-blowing "I see dead people" or that moment in The Village when you find out the nightmarish creatures scurrying about in the woods aren't real, but Shyamalan insists that's what he set out to do.
"I'm deciding on the minor note; how to end on a minor note," the filmmaker told various publications at Tribeca Festival just last month, when he was still tinkering with the edit.
"Unbreakable ends on a kind of a dip, right? He goes to the dark note, that minor note at the end. The guy you thought was the best friend is the villain. The minor note sticks to you forever."
Old ends with Trent and Maddox alerting the authorities to what Nils and co have been up to; their crazy accounts backed up by previous victims' journals they'd found half-buried in the sand, many filled with names of people who had previously been declared missing.
It doesn't worry itself trying to apply logic to a place where time passes scarily fast and while that might frustrate some, perhaps it's for the best? For all its far-fetched moments, that might've been a step too far.
Old is in cinemas now.
Blockbusters are back – and the latest edition of Digital Spy Magazine has got everything you need to know about the summer's biggest box office arrivals. Read every issue now with a 1-month free trial, only on Apple News+.
Interested in Digital Spy's weekly newsletter? Sign up to get it sent straight to your inbox – and don't forget to join our Watch This Facebook Group for daily TV recommendations and discussions with other readers.
You Might Also Like
