YMMV / Old

• Adaptation Displacement: The film is an adaptation of a Swiss graphic novel that isn't particularly well-known to international or non-Francophone readers.
• Alternate Character Interpretation: Idlib invites a lot of this. How much does he know of the hotel's true intentions? He tells Trent that he has no friends, and his uncle physically forces him out of the restaurant when he goes to say hi to Trent and Maddox after they were nice to him. Has he tried to warn people before with his coded messages? Or were Trent and Maddox the exceptions when Trent promised that they would be friends and FaceTime together?
• Awesome Music: Remain; coming off the Bittersweet Ending, this haunting song perfectly encapsulates that ultimately, Old is not just a horror movie, but a tragedy.
• Ending Fatigue: After Trent and Maddox seemingly drown, there's a scene revealing the secret lab, exposition of the motivations behind the villains and a seemingly Here We Go Again! moment featuring another family. Then Trent and Maddox turn out to be alive, the cop who was staying at the resort is informed about the actions of the lab and there is a flashback showing Trent and Maddox escaping through the coral reef, with a cut to black. Then, there is one final scene of the two on a helicopter being taken away, before finally ending.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Trent and Maddox may have survived and put a stop to the scientists using the beach to test experimental medicine but they are in their 50s, and might get depressed over their inability to live functional lives, possibly cutting their lives short.
• Friendly Fandoms: People who found the movie to be a So Bad, It's Good narm-tastic piece of entertainment have largely shared these feelings with the movie Ma, which also had some of the same popularity in these circles.
• Funny Moments:
  • After she and Trent have sex as teenagers, Kara writes off her baby bump as just "getting a little fat". Oh Kara, you poor summer child. However this is justified since she is still mentally a six-year-old girl.
  • While preparing for Trent and Kara's baby, the adults explain to Trent what's going on. Their explanation could be summed up in a nutshell: "...What you just did is where babies come from." Trent can only justify "I know, but I thought you had to do that like ten times!"
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • While waiting for Kara to birth the baby they accidentally conceived, Trent promises himself to not only marry Kara, but also uphold a relationship where neither one will split up or even fight. Given he's still a child at heart and his own parents' marriage is less than ideal, that's a wholesome level of commitment right there.
  • Guy and Prisca, due to literally being Older and Wiser, realizing that their previous marital issues were trivial in the grand scheme. It's an awfully poignant scene, but it's one of the few (if not only) gentler moments of the story. They make peace before they both pass away moments from each other.
  • Trent and Maddox thank Idlib silently for saving their lives by showing him they decoded the page he gave Trent. While he's sad on seeing that his new friend is now an old man, they are grateful.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The original graphic novel was going to have a twist ending, but then the creators decided it would be better to never explain the aging and have no one be able to escape. Then the film adaptation is done by a director well known for big twist endings, who indeed creates a new twist ending for why the characters are on the beach, although the cause of the aging is still left ambiguous. Granted, it's more of an explanation than an outright twist, given the unnecessarily gigantic bag of food makes clear early on that the hotel staff is well aware of what happens to people on the beach.
• Magnificent Bastard: The unnamed Big Bad is a pharmaceutical executive posing as the manager of a high-class island resort. Years earlier, his team of researchers discovered a beach surrounded by mysterious rocks that produced radiation which accelerated the cell life cycle thousands of times over. Realizing that this could be used to run ultra-rapid studies on cures for notorious diseases, he founded his sham hotel to lure people to the island, with any guests with chronic illnesses sent to the beach for the drug tests, with the unfortunate side effect that the radiation causes them to inevitably die of old age. His studies have likely killed hundreds, but he takes no pride in that fact, believing that his victims should be honored as martyrs to scientific breakthroughs that could save untold millions.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • On Twitter, people have taken to mocking the premise of the film with a "beach that makes you old" meme. Usually it involves "Before and After" punchline with a photo of someone, usually an actor in their youth, a photo of a beach, then a photo of them in their old age from the present.
    • This description of the movie has apparently also gotten quite a few people out of the loop thinking it had something to do with Death Stranding.
    • Asking what would happen if Benjamin Button went to the beach that makes you old.
    • Shyamalan himself retweeted one using the "For the better, right?" format.
  • The Old movie. No, not the old movie…
  • "They chose this beach... poorly."
  • That Shyamalan got the idea for the film after seeing his skin get wrinkly from being in the water.
• Narm:
  • Mid-Size Sedan's Dull Surprise delivery of "oh damn" when his female companion's body is discovered, which is out of place in what is meant to be a tense scene.
    • The name "Mid-Size Sedan" itself has garnered more than a few unintentional chuckles.
  • The fact that much of the film's questionably worded dialogue ("He's a joke, he's a pretend person!") sounds like something that came out of The Room (2003) (or Shyamalan's similarly infamous The Happening). Guy and Prisca's accents don't help.
  • One of the most infamous lines of the movie is "It's rust! It acts like poison when it gets into your bloodstream!", which Prisca says as the audience sees Charles being overcome with a septic infection after being stabbed with a rusty knife. The on-the-nose exposition mixed with her strangely enthusiastic delivery as a man literally dies right in front of her has garnered the scene endless mockery.
  • After Prisca realizes they are all ageing, she surmises that they didn't notice until the children got older simply because some people show signs of ageing sooner than others. Patricia and Mid-Sized Sedan undercut the tense scene by making an offhand "Black don't crack" reference.
  • "I'M JARIN!!!". Jarin just sounds desperate to have people remember who he is.
  • The dramatic zoom on the note decoded to reveal "My uncle doesn't like the coral." Not only is this the first time the coded note been referenced, it's also the first time coral is mentioned, making the entire scene and reveal come without any weight or resonance to the audience, making the zoom feel goofy and out-of-place.
• Nightmare Fuel: As fitting for a horror movie...
  • The premise: getting trapped on a beach that causes you to rapidly age several years within hours. There's a barrier that prevents people from leaving, making it a slow death they can't escape.
  • The scene where Prisca's tumour is removed. The whole scene is tense and agonizing to watch and manages to play the Healing Factor trope for some serious horror. And when the tumour grows from the size of a golf ball to a grapefruit.
  • Charles's death. He gets cut from a rusty knife, and due to the beach's effects, a septic infection spreads throughout his body in incredible detail. He dies convulsing, and in agony.
  • Charles' wife, Chrystal, doesn't go out any easier: the calcium deficiency causes her to become hunchbacked and extremely thin and tries to stay away so people won't look at her, and when Maddox and Trent come across her in a cave she tries to keep them away by throwing a rock, except it causes her arm to break and to immediately heal crooked. This causes her to fly into a panic, hitting herself against the rocks, just causing more and more fractures. When she finally passes away her arms and legs have become a horrificaly twisted mess.
• Paranoia Fuel: You go on a vacation to what seems like a regular beach. Then you start rapidly aging and can't get out until you die in a matter of hours. Then it turns out the resort you are vacationing in had sent you there to test experimental medicine on your medical condition. Good luck with going back to your favorite beach.
• Squick: Teenage Trent and Kara have sex and Kara gets pregnant. They're six years old but in the bodies of adolescents due to the beach aging them, causing their hormones to come early.
• So Bad, It's Good: This movie is sometimes included among the likes of The Happening and Lady in the Water in Shyamalan's infamous collection of entertainingly awkward flicks. Most of the hilarity comes from the incredibly unrealistic ways characters talk and (over/under)react to one another (not helped by some rather questionable cinematography, particularly concerning actor-camera positioning), which is how most of the film goes.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Fans of the graphic novel weren't happy with the film tacking on an entirely new ending, which overly explains what was meant to simply be a metaphorical fable about fear of aging, and even tries to give some kind of upbeat catharsis to a story that doesn't fit at all. As mentioned in Hilarious in Hindsight above, there are even fans who think the film could have used whatever ending was originally planned for the graphic novel instead.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: A lot of fans wish Trent and Kara's baby had survived to age with the others, especially since that happened in the original graphic novel.
• Win Back the Crowd: While not exactly the best-reviewed film of Shymalan's career, the film largely pleased viewers who wanted to see Shyamalan (again) return to his thriller roots after being sidetracked by the mediocrely-received superhero drama Glass.
• The Woobie: Most of the cast, given that they experience accelerated aging that also causes their painful medical conditions to run rampant. Even the survivors are left knowing that they've lost both loved ones and the best years of their lives. The standout may be Kara, who loses her grandmother early on, watches her dad go crazy, gets pregnant without knowing what's happening, gives birth to a child who quickly dies, and then suffers a Disney Villain Death while trying to get help. And all of this happens while she's mentally six-years-old.

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