My Old Ass, 2024.
Written and Directed by Megan Park.
Starring Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks, Maria Dizzia, Alain Goulem, Seth Isaac Johnson, Carter Trozzolo, and Alexandria Rivera.
SYNOPSIS:
A mushroom trip brings free-spirited Elliott face-to-face with her 39-year-old self. But when Elliott’s “old ass” delivers warnings to her younger self, Elliott realizes she has to rethink everything about her family, life, and love.
Elliott’s world is turned upside down after a drug-induced encounter with her 39-year-old future self, causing her to not take her family and their cranberry farm for granted, reassess her sexuality, and generally become less of an obnoxiously self-absorbed 18-year-old. She also refers to this future self as “my old ass,” which consistently comes across as more of a forced joke that’s not funny the first time it is said, not to mention a bizarre title. One wishes My Old Ass embraced that strangeness.
Instead, this feels half-formed and more committed to the usual Sundance-indie coming-of-age tropes rather than engaging with its weird and inspiring premise of shrooms materializing one’s future self for wisdom, clarity, and advice. It’s also a movie where the most critical details to divulge to the younger Elliott are simply withheld for unconvincing emotional reasons beyond the fact that there wouldn’t be one. Even the premise itself is deceptively more of a framing device, as if Aubrey Plaza liked the project enough to participate for about 10 minutes but not enough to commit to it fully. In other words, there feels like a missed opportunity here to make a unique and imaginative movie rather than the formulaic one the idea resulted in here.
Those aren’t words I want to type, especially since director Megan Park’s The Fallout was a devastatingly emotional feature-length debut, and Maisy Stella brings a spark to the role of Elliott while convincingly conveying the many conflicting thoughts in her head. Chief among them is that her older self, aka My Old Ass (Aubrey Plaza), revealed that her biggest regret was falling in love with someone named Chad while also warning her to stay away from him. Wouldn’t you know it, Chad stumbles into frame the next day (played by Percy Hynes White), having been employed to work on Elliott’s father’s cranberry farm. The only problem is that, even though she tries to stay away, the more she interacts with him, the more she sees him as kind. Eventually, she can’t find a single thing wrong with him, which is shocking to her, having always thought she was gay and regularly having sex with a friend.
For a movie about future selves conjured up through drugs and placed as contacts into a phone following the initial meeting, there surprisingly isn’t much to say about My Old Ass. The mostly selfish Elliott starts to be more present when around her family (which amusingly includes a younger brother with a shrine of pictures on his wall dedicated to his future wife Saoirse Ronan), even becoming disappointed that they will be selling the cranberry farm and thought she wouldn’t have cared since she constantly talks about how much she can’t wait to go to university and get away from a farmer’s life.
Despite some lived-in performances here with specific touches, such as the cranberry farm itself, which also makes for a vibrant visual, there isn’t much to care about here. The proceedings are essentially too laid-back as we wait for the truth about Chad. That revelation is frustrating for many reasons, which I won’t get into because of spoilers, but it mostly amounts to a way for young Elliott to show that she also has worthwhile advice to give to her older self. One also gets the impression that if Aubrey Plaza was in this movie for most of the already short 89-minute running time, there would be more humor and hijinks here. As is, the concept of the movie frustratingly feels like an afterthought. My Old Ass abandons that core idea and settles for leaning into familiar storytelling beats but also feels so familiar that you will be one bored ass.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association and the Critics Choice Association. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews, follow my Twitter or Letterboxd, or email me at MetalGearSolid719@gmail.com
Originally published September 11, 2024. Updated September 12, 2024.
