My Old Ass (2024)

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​After only two feature films, writer-director Megan Park already displays some unique hallmarks with her projects. Both her 2022 debut The Fallout and her latest effort My Old Ass follow Gen-Z teenagers who must wrangle their own self-absorption in order to find some level of fulfillment by the end. Both protagonists come from balanced, loving families yet are inexplicably riddled with levels of ennui and angst that would better befit, say, a child from a broken home.

To be clear, each movie has its own levels of gravitas. The former is set in the wake of a school shooting, while the latter possesses more anodyne, playful topics of time travel and first love. My Old Ass follows Elliott (Maisy Stella), an 18-year-old girl eager to leave her small town to move to the big city for college. About a week before the move, she sees her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) during a mushroom trip. But when the hallucination is over, Elliott is still able to communicate with her.

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During the trip, Old Elliott makes sure to give Young Elliott the usual Older Self advice like, “Spend more time with your parents and siblings,” and the general, “Don’t sweat the petty stuff.” Curiously, however, Young Elliott is also warned to avoid a certain guy named Chad for reasons unknown. Does Chad end up hurting her? Is he a bad person? Does he end up creating a chasm between her and her friends? But while Elliott acquiescently obeys the orders to appreciate her family more, she and Chad (Percy Hynes White) are magnetically drawn to one another, despite our protagonist’s best efforts to stay away.

Blending mumblecore rom-com with some Gen-Z hangout movie tropes, My Old Ass strikes the perfect note between mysterious and sweet, perpetuated by the strong charisma of its two leads and their chemistry together. The magical elements aren’t too assertive, flowing in and out of the film (Plaza goes nearly an hour without making an appearance), yet adds some strange tension to the latter half of the story.

If you’ve seen The Fallout, you know how skilled Park is at orchestrating complex, nuanced themes and constructing fully-formed characters that nestle well inside of those themes. In the 2022 movie, the writer-director invites us to critique her protagonist (Jenna Ortega) as she becomes opened for our judgement. Due to that judgement, we’re better equipped to experience her journey. Conversely, Elliott in My Old Ass has no such intricacy. Her thoughts and musings are no different than ours were at her age. And yet, that’s what makes the film so relatable despite its magical touches. Somehow quasi-time travel is easier to connect with than a school shooting.

Like Ortega’s character, Elliott starts her story embracing the selfishness of youth only to quickly become hyper-conscious of how her arrogance negatively affects the world around her. She ends the film feeling humbled and renewed by her reality check rather than discouraged about living with herself (so to speak). You can feel the filmmaker’s own voice coming through in these characters, her own burgeoning compassion constantly at odds with her propensity for misandrist ideology. But it’s impressive how Park is not only aware of this contradiction but works it into her movies as a major motif.

Looking like a young Kim Cattrall, Maisy Stella is excellent in the starring role, bringing a level of presence and spunk to the performance that you used to see from Parker Posey in the ‘90s, but with a dash of undiscovered innocence, perhaps from the actress herself. She could’ve likely sparked chemistry with any young man opposite her, despite White’s own talents and likability. The future is bright for both young stars.

My Old Ass isn’t the first to express how youth is wasted on the young, but it also puts itself in a unique position to show both sides of the argument as well; how the hope and naivety of youth can actually yield bravery and opportunity in a way that wisdom can only inhibit at times. The movie is so delightfully weird, both tonally and conceptually, that its sappiness doesn’t feel icky. In fact, we welcome the balance.

What will happen to Elliott as a grown woman exceeds the reach of this movie, often to its detriment. Young Elliott is frustratingly complacent with the lack of information about her future. If you ever feel like you want more from these fantasy elements, then welcome to the plight of watching magic realism.

For My Old Ass, we don’t require any “rules” for this preposterous temporal device, but it’s natural for us to want to live with it longer. At one point, Plaza’s Elliott, living in her own time, hangs up the phone after we hear sirens in the background, reminding us of an entirely different perspective that exists within this world. We’d love to know how broken or jaded Elliott has become so we can put her youthful outlook into perspective. We also just want to experience the future while hanging out with Aubrey Plaza.

It’s easy to be rebellious when you know you have the support of a loving family, just like it’s easy to leave home when you have somewhere safe to return to. However, Elliott’s harmless desire to flee her small town is upended by a life’s worth of surprises received in a single week. You could make a crude analogy between Elliott’s trajectory and that of Lester Burnham in American Beauty; you often need to forget everything you know about yourself in order to make the changes necessary for true happiness. And oftentimes, it can be found where you are right now.​