M. Night Shyamalan has made some pretty unique movies, usually accompanied by a twist that will make a viewer want to go back and rewatch the entire movie with their newfound knowledge. His interesting career as a filmmaker has had its ups and downs, but the trailer for his new movie Old looks incredibly promising with familiar actors such as Alex Wolff from his break-out performance in Hereditary and Thomasin McKenzie from her role in Jojo Rabbit. This is an exciting moment for fans of M. Night Shyamalan, as it is great to finally be looking forward to his next movie. But what will it be about, and will there be a crazy twist at the end?
The trailers show a few families who have taken a trip to a secluded beach where things seem to be a little off. They've also been warned that no children are allowed on the beach, which they promptly ignore. After playing in a cave, the children discover a corpse. Seemingly out of nowhere, the children begin to rapidly age. The corpse begins to decompose, and this is even more strange because they say a body takes at least seven years to do this. After coming out of the cave, the children have aged by several years.
But the title Old seems too on the nose for such a movie, especially coming from M. Night Shyamalan who clearly loves a good twist (who doesn't?). Could there be any deeper meaning to that title? At least from the trailers, this movie will be about life from beginning to end, only sped up significantly. Perhaps the title could stand for something else more clever. The way the font for the title sequence (in the 40-second Super Bowl trailer) is presented gives the appearance of a ticking clock. Maybe the 'O' could stand for the circle of life, the 'L' would be life, and the 'D' would be death. This could mean that this will be a time loop story and so the characters' perception of reality and time will be off.
Some of the characters in the trailers are seen aging rapidly, and others seem to be aging slower. The children are the most noticeably aged characters, maybe as a metaphor for childhood years going by quickly. There is a young woman in a bikini taking a selfie, who sort of appears as a symbol of vanity. If the characters do age differently, perhaps the curse of old age will hit this young woman more intensely and she will not be able to handle it since she places so much value in appearance. And there are smartphones, watches, and other valuables lying on the beach. The phones stick out of the sand in a way that resembles a headstone on a grave—suggesting the people who once held these phones were constantly on them, and therefore they were their phones, so why not use that as their resting place totem?
The children appear to have aged, but maybe the camera lens is in the eye of the parents. Maybe a possible twist could be that the children never have aged, but the parents are having a vision of the future of their children, and it scares the parents to see the children getting older because it means they too are getting older. This all adds up until the scene in the trailer where one of the children (who is now adult aged in appearance) becomes pregnant and gives birth, which would mean the children actually have aged and it is not just a vision. Although, another twist could be that these aren't the parents' children, but are actually the parents themselves as children and they are seeing their life go by from beginning to end very quickly.
The bodies of the children are aging but their minds appear to still be quite innocent and naive. Is this why the pamphlet said no children allowed on the beach? Or is there another reason more sinister? Either way, the families need to find a way off the beach. They try climbing, swimming, and exiting the way they came from. This results in them 'blacking out' and having some kind of seizure. Where do they go when they blackout? One theory could be that they are returning to the real world during these blackouts, but the only thing they can remember when they return is the beach trip. This insinuates that day-to-day life is forgettable, and we only remember fun times like family beach vacations. Maybe this is how the girl played by Eliza Scanlen got pregnant—she left the beach but didn't remember.
A popular saying is to live fast and die young, but with the world moving so quickly it can make one's own life feel short because it went by too fast. The mother, played by Vicky Krieps, has a line in the trailer where she says something about the family needing to slow down when the young boy starts getting impatient. This line within the context of a movie about old age makes the image of all the phones seem more important. The characters could be used to show how people often are looking down at their phones for several hours day after day that one day when they finally look up, several years will have gone by.
There is a piece of paper with a code on it. If this is a time loop, then the characters could have been trying to send a message to their younger selves. Maybe the message is a warning for their young selves to not come to the beach, or maybe it's a warning for them to slow down and make each day count. Although Old is based on a French novel titled Sandcastle, this is M. Night Shyamalan, so this won't be a straightforward adaptation. The novel is very controversial with an unresolved ending, so hopefully, M. Night Shyamalan will give us something more meaningful with a better story.