The M. Night Shyamalan movie Old proved to be a unique approach to the horror genre as the director intensified a fear many people commonly share — aging. Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle, the movie took the concept of aging and created a sense of urgency behind the effect the beach had on the victims’ bodies. Each character had a specific medical condition that would worsen over time, but the beach gave researchers an opportunity to test medications on the victims in a matter of hours rather than over a lifetime.
The concept was an interesting twist on the graphic novel, and the explanation gave viewers an antagonist to hate after watching the victims suffer their fates. But Old still left audiences with an eerie feeling and overwhelming terror over their natural aging process. The saying “ignorance is bliss” seems relevant to this film, as people are often ignorant of the medical conditions they will suffer later in life. However, the film showed how quickly these conditions could get out of hand. People would like to believe they have some control over their life, especially the slow descent in health over time. But Old took that element away and created realistic panic for the characters.
The children were the first to show that they were rapidly aging when two 6-year-olds had grown into teenagers over a few hours. They had a strong connection as they lay in the tent together while the rest of the adults panicked about the schizophrenic man attacking others on the beach. And the most iconic moment from the trailer was the pregnancy of one of the original children, with Shyamalan doing an amazing job of implying the harsh reality of its short-lived existence without showing the trauma of the moment. But the fear was still highly prevalent in the scene as the mother and father of the baby were still mentally six years old and couldn’t understand the complexity of what just happened to them.
And the fear grew from there as the characters brainstormed ways to get off the island without wasting their lives, only for them to waste time no matter what choice they made or didn’t make. Some characters couldn’t even die of natural causes, cutting their lives even shorter, but some did die from their medical conditions, and the results were horrifying. The parents of the surviving characters were the only ones to die of old age, and their progression caused an overall calmness between them in a way that was both sweet and terrifying.
Most people would hope they spend their final moments of old age with their loved ones, but their rapid aging puts a damper on that ending. As they sat around the fire, one of them having gone blind and the other having gone deaf, they were able to express acceptance and regrets about their lives before they arrived at the beach. Their acceptance of their fate was common when considering the psychological study of senior citizens, and the scene was important as a way of showing different forms of death for the characters. But the despair the surviving characters felt at that moment was still valid.
In the end, Trent and Maddox are the only survivors of the events on the beach, and they express the feeling that their lives were unfair. Their childhood, teen years and early adulthood were all stolen from them. They didn’t get to experience life at a normal rate, and they had witnessed horrific traumas in just a matter of hours, including the awkward death scene of the woman with hypocalcemia. While they were able to seek justice by exposing the pharmaceutical company to the media, they could never get the time they lost back.
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