An M. Night Shyamalan horror movie is always going to deliver a twist, and the ending of Old is no different. The 2021 horror movie begins with a premise that some might not think makes any sense: a group of characters travel to a beach resort and learn that they are getting older super quickly. They have no idea what's happening or if they can make it stop and go back home.
While M. Night Shyamalan has made some of the most compelling and entertaining horror and thriller movies, including The Sixth Sense which has an amazing twist, not everyone loved Old. Still, the movie has an interesting ending, and it's cool to see how it compares to the graphic novel that it is based on.
How Does Old End?
After the premise of Old is revealed that the characters vacationing on a beach are aging quickly (one year every half an hour), a character says that "trial 73" is over. This is the big twist that is always part of an M. Night Shyamalan movie, including The Visit. For some, they might have guessed what was going on from the start. For others, this might have come out of nowhere.
Audiences find out that Warren & Warren, a pharmaceutical company, created the beach resort. They want to experiment on people and give them drugs. The timeline of the beach allows them to do these drug trials really quickly.
Maddox and Trent save the day when they tell Greg Mitchel (Daniel Ison) a police officer, what has been going on. The Old ending explains that Greg will help Maddox (Thomasin McKenzie) and Trent Cappa (Alex Wolff) see their aunt again and the Warren & Warren employees are going to be investigated.
Old didn't do well with audiences, as the premise can be hard to get on board with, and the twist is even more confusing. The movie has a 50% rating on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer and a 53% Audience Score. When compared to the best plot twists in movies, the Old ending is strange. Why is this beach full of magical powers? What caused that in the first place? The movie suggests that audiences should suspend their disbelief and simply agree that this is true. But it still feels too far-fetched to be possible.
The explanation of a company experimenting on people on this beach is also pretty heavy-handed. There have been countless movies, TV shows, and books that talk about the evils of corporate greed, and this feels like piling on instead of telling and fresh and original story. While there are some good but illogical plot twists, Old just doesn't work well.
What is Old Based On?
Old is based on the graphic novel Sandcastle by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters. The general story is the same, as characters travel to a beach for a vacation and realize that they are going to age very quickly.
There are many great horror movies based on graphic novels as these are often rich and creative source material. While not everyone loved Old, part of the criticism was that it didn't live up to the promise of the source material. Sandcastle is fascinating and mysterious, and it makes sense that Shyamalan wanted to adapt it. However, it's possible to argue that the twist ending of Old makes the mistake of offering up an explanation that audiences aren't going to buy.
What Happens In The Original Source Material?
There is one big difference between the graphic novel and the movie. In Old, the characters are murdered, which contributes to the creepy atmosphere. In Sandcastle, the characters choose to die because they have learned the truth about what's going to happen to them, or they simply become older and pass away.
It's interesting that while Old gives a reason for why people are aging on this beach, Sandcastle leaves that as a mystery. Readers find out that people age every 30 minutes and that they are going to die. But that's about it.
The Old ending does offer up an explanation for why people are aging so fast on this beach. But even though it makes sense to fully explain this, some feel that Old is a poor adaptation. Some people didn't like the Old twist ending and felt that it was corny rather than scary or interesting.
In an interview with Cinemablend.com, M. Night Shyamalan shared why he chose to create the ending that he did. He said, "The ending for the movie came from [Sandcastle], at least my interpretation of a couple of the moments in the middle of the graphic novel where they insinuate something mysterious … there’s something mysterious there, and this was my explanation of those frames [and] what was going on there."