Old: The Biggest Unanswered Questions, Mysteries & Plot Holes

[Animous]

M. Night Shyamalan's new thriller Old eventually reveals why its unlucky characters have been lured to a beach that causes them to rapidly age, but there are still some unanswered questions and mysteries left over at the end of the film.

Based on the graphic novel Sandcastle, by Pierre Oscar Lévy and Frederik Peeters, Old's story begins with married couple Guy and Prisca taking their children, Trent and Maddox, on a luxury resort vacation. The resort's manager invites them to take a trip to a secluded beach, arranging a bus to transport them and even supplying them with a strangely over-generous supply of food. Too late, the family realizes that the beach causes people to age a year for every half-hour they spend there, and once they've arrived there's no way to escape.

RELATED: How To Watch Every M. Night Shyamalan Movie (Including Old)

The ending of Old reveals that the resort is actually run by Warren & Warren, a pharmaceutical company that has discovered the beach's unique properties and is using it to fast-track long-term studies on medical treatments. The personalized cocktails that people are given on arrival contain experimental drugs, and they are lured to the beach so that scientists can see if their medicine is effective over months and years - all of which pass in the space of a day. Shyamalan's movie goes a lot further than the original graphic novel did in explaining the nature of the beach (if anything, the movie over-explains things), but here are the biggest mysteries, plot holes, and unanswered questions left at over the end.

Why Doesn't The Resort Have A 'No Kids Allowed' Policy?

A line from the trailer for Old, in which Guy says that the resort has a "no kids allowed" policy, turns out in the movie to simply be a joke that Guy makes to tease his children. It does raise the question, however, of why exactly the resort manager not only allows but encourages children to go to the beach with their parents. All of the test subjects who are given treatments for their conditions are adults, and the pharmaceutical staff have a moment of silence for their "sacrifice" after each experiment is complete. The resort manager also gives a pep talk to the Warren & Warren staff in which he justifies the loss of life on the beach by pointing out the thousands of lives that are saved by the drugs they're developing.

But if this is the justification used to ease the collective consciences of the scientists and doctors conducting the experiments, unnecessarily including children in the experiment with no scientific benefit at all would surely be a morale-killer. It would be easy enough to filter out under-16s from their experiments, since many real vacation resorts are limited to adults only. Without such a policy, Warren & Warren's list of potential hires is limited to people are not only OK with murdering people for the sake of science, but are also OK with killing innocent children for no reason.

Why Don't People Get ' The Bends' When Entering The Beach?

When the characters in Old repeatedly find themselves unable to escape the beach - whether by going back through the canyon, climbing the rocks, or swimming out to sea - it's suggested that their blackouts are caused by a time-distortion equivalent of the bends, also known as decompression sickness. This occurs when divers return to the surface of the water too quickly, and seizures and loss of consciousness are among the common symptoms. If this theory is accurate, though, it fails to explain why the characters don't experience any side effects as they enter the beach and their aging starts to rapidly speed up. Decompression sickness has its counterpart in conditions caused by diving too deeply, like nitrogen narcosis and high-pressure nervous syndrome. It's surprising, therefore, that people don't feel any effects at all when entering the beach.

RELATED: Why Old's Reviews Are So Mixed

Why Didn't Anyone Try Jarin's Escape Plan?

After floating his decompression sickness theory, Jarin suggests a way that they could escape through the canyon: by moving a single step at a time, allowing their bodies to adjust before taking each step. Passing through the canyon in this way would cost a person around 20 years of their lifespan, which is a heavy price to pay, but certainly a better option than simply waiting to die on the beach. However, no one tests this theory - not even Jarin, who takes the far greater risk of trying to swim to freedom and ends up drowning soon afterwards.

While it's a little frustrating that there's never any payoff for this plan, it does fit with the larger themes of Old, and especially the graphic novel it's based on. In Sandcastle, a character tells a story about a king who is confronted by death and begs for his life. Death tells him that it will leave now, but it could return for him at any point in the next seven years. The terrified king builds a fort around himself and orders his guards to send away anyone who comes calling. For the next seven years he hides away in his fort, missing chances to see his children, who are turned away from the door when they try to visit. When death eventually returns for him, he realizes that he has wasted his precious extra years of life and buried himself inside a tomb of his making.

As Guy and Prisca grow old, they begin to forget why they ever wanted to leave the beach in the first place and stop trying to escape. Trent and Maddox also lose begin to relax, sleeping away decades of their lives. Even after they realize that they can escape through the coral, they first stop and take the time to build a sandcastle together. This slowing down echoes the idea in Sandcastle that the value of life isn't in how long it lasts, but how it is spent.

Why Does The Beach Affect Dead Bodies But Not 'Dead Cells'?

Perhaps one of the biggest plot holes created by Old's flaw of over-explaining things is a line addressing why the characters' hair and nails don't grow or change as the rest of their bodies do. This is put down to nails and hair being "dead cells" that are therefore unaffected by the beach's power, which only impacts living cells. The discussion was most likely intended to justify Old's production not spending eye-watering amounts of money on different wigs, but it contradicts the fact that the dead bodies on the beach - which also consist of "dead cells" - decompose at the same accelerated speed that living bodies age.

RELATED: Old Movie Ending & All Twists Explained

Why Hasn't The Resort Been Investigated Before?

Old explains that Warren & Warren lures test subjects to its resort by carefully targeting people with diseases that they're interested in studying, and the resort also has plenty of regular guests to camouflage its true purpose. However, if this is Test #73 then that means that there have been dozens of tests and hundreds of previous subjects who have died on the beach. The only explanation offered for how the resort covers this up is that the guests are told to leave their passports in their rooms. That's quite a thin cover for the massive plot hole of no one noticing that hundreds of missing persons all vanished after heading to the exact same vacation resort. Destroying passports after the fact wouldn't prevent people from telling their friends, families and workplaces where they were heading on their upcoming vacation.

Is Old Set In The Same Universe As The Unbreakable Trilogy?

Though Old isn't explicitly connected to any of M. Night Shyamalan's previous films, it does have some interesting links to them. Shyamalan's horror movie The Visit was also built upon the fear of aging, though in that movie it manifested through the main characters' fear of their elderly grandparents. The symbols on the coded notes that Idlib writes to Trent are reminiscent of the crop circles in Signs. The premise of people trying to survive the sudden appearance of an invisible force that's trying to kill them brings to mind the killer plant toxins of The Happening. And Chrystal's calcium deficiency (and the horrifying consequences of it) shares a common thread with Mr. Glass, the brittle-boned character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Shyamalan's Unbreakable trilogy.

Out of Shyamalan's filmography, Old has the most in common with the magical realism of the Unbreakable trilogy, where a mostly ordinary world is elevated by a few strange and fantastical phenomena. Old could easily have fit in an ending twist revealing that Mr. Glass was connected to Warren & Warren, and was using Chrystal to test a possible cure for his osteogenesis imperfecta. Perhaps it's for the best that Shyamalan avoided that explicit link, especially since it would be too similar to Split's ending twist. Nonetheless, it's interesting that Old exists in that same delicate intersection of fantasy and science fiction. And like David Dunn's invincibility and The Beast's transformation, the true nature of the beach is never fully explained.

[Silent Watcher]

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