Why M. Night Shyamalan’s Old Is Like an Episode of The Twilight Zone

Unlike some of his famous twist endings, it won’t shock you to hear that M. Night Shyamalan is a divisive filmmaker. His highs, like The Sixth Sense, are undeniable, but he’s also had some lows like The Happening or The Last Airbender.

Shyamalan’s 2021 movie Old (airing this month on SYFY) is sometimes thrown in the bad pile. It’s not hard to see why, as a meme-worth premise like “a beach that makes you old” admittedly lends itself to mocking. However, this is the wrong way to view Old, a movie that is actually a success because of its modest aims. Don’t turn on Old expecting a masterpiece of cinema; watch it the same way you would watch an episode of The Twilight Zone (airing regularly on SYFY).

Why M. Night’s SHyamalan’s Old is a lot like a Twilight Zone episode

It’s an appropriate comparison. Old has everything you’d expect from an episode of Rod Serling’s iconic anthology series except for Serling’s opening and closing narration. (Shyamalan makes a cameo like he does in all his movies, which is kind of similar.) There are some actors you recognize or who are about to become bigger stars, an unrushed sense of drama despite supernatural occurrences, and, of course, a twist ending.

Old is about a family who goes on vacation at a resort whose amenities include a secret beach (with a dark secret). Our protagonists are Guy (Gael García Bernal) and Prisca (Vicky Krieps), a couple who are about to separate and decide to go on one last trip with their teenage kids (Alex Wolff and Thomasin McKenzie) before splitting. Once they get to the beach, they and some of the other guests notice weird things. For starters, they’re all getting older, aging by a year or so every 30 minutes. They also can’t leave the beach, as attempting to exit back through the cave they entered or scaling the cliffs causes them to black out and reappear on the beach. The waves are too rough and the coral reefs are too dangerous to escape by water, either. They also notice that one member of every visiting family has an underlying medical condition.

For most of Old’s runtime, we’re just watching this family and their fellow guests attempt to figure out what’s going on as they attempt to escape, unsuccessfully on both fronts. They grow older, giving us some body horror that is admittedly beyond anything you would’ve seen on CBS in the early ‘60s when The Twilight Zone was on the air. But we also see lifetimes of drama happen on this compressed scale. Children become adults far, far too quickly, and they already grow up so fast. Guy and Prisca make amends before dying of old age next to each other. In a twisted way, they’re enjoying a luxury that so few couples have. For as much as “The Beach That Makes You Old” is a punchline, it also offers an eerie, fairytale-like quality to the film. 

Then there’s the twist: why does the beach make you old? The French-language graphic novel the movie is based on, Sandcastle, does not offer an explanation. Shyamalan’s film does, (sort of) and it’s where a lot of viewers roll their eyes. While there’s no explanation for why the beach makes you old, the film reveals that the resort is a front for a pharmaceutical company that’s using the beach’s strange properties to run drug trials that would normally take a lifetime in just a few hours. It’s only when Guy and Prisca’s now-adult children manage to escape through a secret underwater tunnel through the coral that the nefarious plot is revealed. 

This is a pretty ridiculous silly twist. It feels somewhat random and arbitrary. But that’s fine, because maybe the twist isn’t really the point. And, for as famous as many of The Twilight Zone’s greatest twist endings are, you could make the case that the twists aren’t really the point of them, either. Sure the twists of “Eye of the Beholder” and “To Serve Man” are more iconic than Old’s denouement, but The Twilight Zone was a show about people and relationships more than it was about surprises. (Also the twist in “”Five Characters In Search of an Exit” isn’t that much less silly than Old, if we’re being honest.) The Twilight Zone’s twists wouldn’t matter if you didn’t care about these characters, and they only come after 30 minutes of time spent with them as they puzzle out a strange, spooky occurrence. That’s exactly what happens in Old, which is great not because of “The Beach That Makes You Old” but because of what its characters do on that beach. 

Old shouldn’t be viewed as Shyamalan’s next would-be masterpiece after The Sixth Sense. It’s something much humbler than that. It has the vibe of an entry in a spooky anthology series. And as evidenced by The Twilight Zone’s enduring popularity, that’s a good thing to be.

Old is airing this month on SYFY. Classic episodes of The Twilight Zone air regularly on SYFY. Click here for complete scheduling info.