Old: Star Alex Wolff on the Film’s Unsettling Allegories

M. Night Shyamalan has explored all manner of terrors throughout his career, from otherworldly beings invading the planet to spectral spirits to fantastical monsters, with his latest film, Old, tackling one of the only inevitable fears that everyone faces. What added an unexpected level of significance to a story about people rapidly aging is the timing of its release, as the global pandemic and subsequent closures and quarantining protocols have made many feel as though they’ve lost an entire year in hopes of slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. Old star Alex Wolff recently reflected on how the film serves as an allegory not only of the past year, but of the entire concept of aging. Old lands in theaters on July 23rd.

“The movie is not just an allegory for right now, which it totally is for the pandemic and everything that’s been going on in 2020 on, but I think it’s an allegory for how we’re feeling all the time,” Wolff expressed to ComicBook.com. “I just think that the pandemic made a lot of people who were ‘go, go, go’ look around, and say, ‘Damn, we’ve gotta be stagnant for a while, this is really intense.’ But I think that me, more than other people, looks around sometimes and is like, ‘Wow, time is going pretty fast.’ So I think Old is not even a science-fiction movie or a horror movie or anything, I think of it as a documentary of what’s going on.”

The new film is described, “This summer, visionary filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan unveils a chilling, mysterious new thriller about a family on a tropical holiday who discover that the secluded beach where they are relaxing for a few hours is somehow causing them to age rapidly … reducing their entire lives into a single day.”

Due in large part to how effective Shyamalan’s stories have been over the years, Wolff was immensely excited at the opportunity to join the picture, recalling his reaction to actually being put in touch with the filmmaker about the opportunity.

“I had to just tape, go in cold, I had to fight for it,” Wolff confessed. “Luckily, he didn’t make me fight too much in that he saw a lot of the character in myself, but, no, I had to just go and do a raw tape and send it in and send it out to the abyss and I thought maybe I’d hear something and then even hearing the words on the phone, ‘Mr. M. Night Shyamalan wants to talk with you and read with you,’ felt like a rush of a drug right in my veins. I couldn’t believe it, because I’d grown up with him being … The same way I think, in the ’70s, people felt about a new Robert Altman movie, it was, ‘Okay, we don’t what we’re gonna expect but it’s gonna be something special and it’s gonna be something magical and exhilarating,’ and I feel like I got to … It’s my biggest dream.”

Old lands in theaters on July 23rd.

Are you looking forward to the new film? Let us know in the comments below or contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter to talk all things horror and Star Wars!