Aging comes with lots of baggage – impaired mobility, impaired mental function for some and a cocktail of illnesses, some of which are inescapable no matter how healthy a life one led.
I recently watched a movie called Old People, a social commentary exploring the disregard with which society tends to treat its elderly people, and how this indifference could one day turn against the younger generation, which has no time for its old.
The contents of the movie are a gruesome fantasy where the old people, who have been abandoned by their families in a neglected nursing facility, gradually lose their humanity and go on a killing spree. They gang up and hunt down the young people in the vicinity, starting with a cruel carer at the facility who has the habit of talking them down and taunting them. They make their way out of the ‘jail’ and head to the village, which they set on fire and kill everyone they come across. At the end of the movie, all the adults die, the only surviving main characters are two children who barely make it out of the doomed village alive. What is implied is that they only survive because the youngest child, a boy, had cultivated a loving relationship with his grandfather, who had been living in the godforsaken home.
