Warning: SPOILERS ahead for Old.
Filmmaker M. Night Shyamalan is known for focusing on original, standalone movies, but that changed with the surprise reveal that 2016’s Split was actually set in a shared universe with his 2000 superhero movie Unbreakable. The two stories came together in the final chapter of the trilogy, Glass, but could the Shyamalan Cinematic Universe also contain his newest release, Old?
Shyamalan’s films have a tendency towards magical realism – presenting a slice of the fantastical in an otherwise ordinary world. The Glass trilogy explored the idea of what superhuman powers might look like if they were stripped of comic book exaggeration, and Old turns an ordinary family vacation into a nightmare when a group of people realize the beach they’re on is causing them to rapidly age. Though the movies are ostensibly unconnected, there is one element present in both the Glass trilogy and Old: a cameo appearance by Shyamalan himself.
Just as Stan Lee’s many different cameos throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe were revealed, in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, to all be the same person informing on the universe’s affairs to a cosmic race of beings called the Watchers, several of Shyamalan’s cameos could actually be the same person. His brief appearance in Glass explained how his characters in Unbreakable and Split, who at first seemed to be completely different people in very different lines of work, were actually the same man: a drug dealer turned security guard called Jai. And since Shyamalan’s character in Old goes unnamed, could this simply be the same character in a new job?
How M. Night Shyamalan’s Cameo Connects The Glass Trilogy
When Shyamalan made his first cameo appearance in Unbreakable, there was no intention of giving his character a three-movie arc. The film’s protagonist, David Dunn, possesses extra-sensory perception that makes him extremely effective at his job as a stadium security guard. While testing his powers, he brushes past someone in a blue jacket (played by Shyamalan) and senses that the man is carrying drugs. David later catches up to him and pats him down, but the man has already stashed the drugs. He coolly tells David that he hopes he finds the drug dealer he’s looking for, and narrowly escapes his encounter with the vigilante who will later become known as the Overseer (after the nicknames “Green Guard” and “Tiptoe Man” fail to stick).
Willis’s cameo at the end of Split was a surprise twist, so Shyamalan’s cameo earlier in the movie wasn’t explicitly connected to his role in Unbreakable. Shyamalan was instead introduced as Jai, a building security guard who helps Dr. Fletcher to review CCTV footage while engaging in a conversation about the merits of Hooters. When Jai returned in Glass, he was visiting David Dunn’s security store to pick up some better equipment in the wake of Dr. Fletcher’s murder. After spotting David, he recognized him as the same security guard who had patted him down at the stadium, and admitted that he used to hang out with some “shady types.“
Shyamalan could have easily let his appearances in Unbreakable and Split remain disconnected, since a director having cameos as two different characters isn’t a particularly huge plot hole. However, revealing that Dr. Fletcher’s building security guard had coincidentally crossed paths with David Dunn 16 years earlier contributes to the sense of a greater shared universe. And if Jai can undergo a radical career change from being a drug dealer to being a security guard, he could easily have gotten a new job since the end of Glass – for example, a job working in surveillance for a shady pharmaceutical company.
Theory: Shyamalan’s Character In Old Is Jai
In Old, Shyamalan plays a van driver who transports a luxury resort’s chosen guests to a nearby secluded beach. The sense that something shady is going on begins when the driver hands them massive hampers full of food – far more than they would expect to eat in a single day. As the nightmare begins to unfold on the beach, the kids spot an odd light reflection on a nearby cliffside that looks like someone is observing them with binoculars and a camera.
At the end of the movie, when all the other characters have died and Trent and Maddox get stuck while attempting to swim to freedom through a coral reef, Old reveals that the van driver was the person observing them. Working out of a base on the cliffside, he has a collection of surveillance equipment that’s rather reminiscent of Jai’s bank of CCTV cameras in Split. As he puts in a call to the pharmaceutical company that has been using the beach to conduct drug trials on unsuspecting victims, the driver dispassionately reports that all of the test subjects are now dead.
Though the character remains unnamed, his expertise in surveillance equipment, his loose morals and his deadpan attitude in the face of death all fit with the characterization of Jai in the Glass trilogy. It’s not a stretch to think that he might have left his old security job and ended up being recruited by the pharmaceutical company in Old. And by pushing the idea that some of Shyamalan’s cameos are the same person a little further, there are other movies that could be part of the same shared universe.
Other Shyamalan Cameos That Could Be Jai
Some of Shyamalan’s appearances in his movies can be ruled out. For example, unless David Dunn and Malcolm Crowe are identical twins who were separated at birth, it’s safe to say that The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable are not set in the same universe. In Lady in the Water Shyamalan played a fairly substantial role as Vick Ran, a writer whose book was destined to indirectly be responsible for saving humanity, so that movie can probably be ruled out as well. The same goes for Signs, in which Shyamalan played a guilt-ridden man called Ray Reddy who had accidentally killed the protagonist’s wife in a road traffic accident.
One Shyamalan movie that could potentially be part of the same universe as Glass and Old is The Village. Interestingly, Shyamalan’s role in this movie was once again an unnamed character in a security job. He played a park ranger responsible for securing the perimeter of a wildlife preserve surrounding the movie’s titular village. That film was released in 2004, a few years after Unbreakable, and certainly long enough to get out of the drug-dealing game and start a career in security. Shyamalan’s cameo in The Happening, which was limited to a voice role for a character called “Joey,” was also small enough not to contradict the idea of a shared universe, or even the idea that Joey and Jai could be the same person.
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