M. Night Shyamalan's "Old" follows a group of families trapped on a private beach that causes
them to age very quickly, essentially making a lifetime pass by in a single day. "Old" is full
of big ideas and baffling concepts, so naturally, viewers are going to have some questions.
In the film's final act, it's revealed that every one of the beach's inhabitants
is an unwilling participant in a medical trial study. The resort is a front for an
organization testing experimental new drugs on handpicked subjects — since the island's natural
energies cause people to age so rapidly, they can conduct years of study within an afternoon.
When all the subjects for this particular trial have died, one of the scientists,
Sidney, explains that the tragedy wasn't all for naught, as their new epilepsy drug worked
on Patricia, preventing her seizures for 16 years in beach time. But when Patricia dies
in the second act, it's from a series of violent seizures that take her life.
Now, every other death on the beach that isn't self-inflicted or literal murder is either an
accident or the ravages of aging, essentially natural causes. But Patricia isn't shown to
have aged fast enough to die of old age, the way Guy and Prisca eventually go out. After roughly a
half hour of screen time without a seizure, she succumbs to a series of them in short
order and dies. But if the new drug was such a success, how did a seizure still kill her?
"What happened to her?"
It's entirely likely that the scientists behind this project just have lower barriers
for success relative to their murky moral barometers than the average viewer might.
Their final act celebration certainly sounded rousing enough to suggest the drug would prevent
someone from dying from seizures, much less having them at all. If the simple answer to how
she died is that the medication works well, but just not that well, it really means these folks
are compartmentalizing and patting themselves on the back even more than initially thought.
One of the other weird things that happens on the beach is that each
of the trial subjects has seeming invulnerability
until ... they don't. So when Charles slashes at rapper Mid-Size Sedan with a knife,
his face cuts heal immediately, but when he stabs him repeatedly in the vital organs, he dies.
But the quick-healing stuff gets pretty confusing when Prisca must defend Charles from murdering
her husband Guy the same way he ultimately did Sedan. She fends him off with a rusty knife,
and when it pierces his skin, Charles' entire body begins to transform like
a particularly involved fatality from "Mortal Kombat" as she matter-of-factly
explains that the rust on the knife is like poison in the human bloodstream.
That actor Vicky Krieps delivers this dialogue with an absolute
straight face is borderline astonishing, because no matter how crazy "Old" gets,
that's a far from satisfactory explanation for the cartoon death Charles undergoes. We're willing to
chalk this one up to, "Well, this doesn't make a lot of sense, but it sure does look pretty cool."
In the film's final series of revelations, the resort manager talks to his staff about how
nature gave them this beach anomaly and all the supernatural effects it brings, suggesting nature
itself wanted this place found and exploited through man-made means to help heal the sick.
It's a stirring supposition to rally a team around, especially if you need to, on a daily
basis, help them make peace with killing innocent people in the pursuit of medical breakthroughs.
But how exactly is the beach, you know, like that? Who found it? How long it did take them
to tap into their capitalistic instincts to turn it into a murder farm for Big Pharma?
Obviously, the experiments themselves took a lot of trial and error,
but how much trial and error happened in this region, accidentally, from people freaking out
and turning geriatric before sundown before some enterprising person came along and was like, "Hey,
let's use this naturally occurring hellscape to sell better drugs?"
Honestly, the core origins of the island and the beach itself could branch off into 30
or 40 more unanswered questions, but there's really only one more that cannot be ignored.
Trying to reverse engineer the complete history of the beach and its origins is a fool's errand — or,
more likely, the problem of whoever Shyamalan tasks with expanding the mythology into
some kind of direct-to-streaming prequel miniseries in the event "Old" does numbers
at the box office. But there's a more pressing question the viewer is left with at the end of
"Old" while Maddox and Trent are on their way home from exposing the resort's true nature.
If the resort manager isn't blatantly lying, and his fervor suggests at the very least he believes
in what they're doing, that means that even though (theoretically) a thousand or so people have died
over these 73 trial groups, the findings from the study have served to save thousands more,
perhaps millions. So, if what they were doing was unsavory but necessary work,
were Maddox and Trent in the right for exposing them?
But that question raises a bigger question. Is all the rhetoric the manager and his colleagues
spew at one another legit and this is a purely humanitarian enterprise designed
to help the world, despite having to let tons of people die to do so?
Or is that just the company line they all tell themselves to sleep at night,
and this resort is just a more science fiction take on the kind of exploitative work
all major corporations require in order to provide ample value for their shareholders?
If it's the former, then maybe Maddox and Trent were justified, especially considering
they have now lost half their lifespans, not to mention their own parents.
This place clearly needs more oversight. But given how well they were able to
operate without interference from law enforcement suggests that whoever founded
this operation also had the grease to keep them shrouded from regulatory agencies and
other powerful organizations that should have put a stop to this far sooner.
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