What would you do if you met your older self? What would you want to know? And what if that older version of you was Aubrey Plaza? Sounds like heaven right? Well that’s the premise of the coming-of-age flick My Old Ass.
Elliott (played by Maisy Stella) is a precocious 18-year-old gearing up to start college after the summer break and leave the confines of her small Canadian town. She is confident and sassy, which is why celebrating her birthday with a shrooms-fuelled camping trip alongside her two best friends (including Dance Moms star Maddie Ziegler) seems like a totally normal idea. Except unlike your typical shrooms trip (realising our collective consciousness and running around naked at a music festival, anyone?) Elliott meets her ‘old ass’ 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza, who comes from a time when sirens blaze over speakers and Penelope Disick is a transcendental meditation leader.
Despite its Sci-Fi -premise, the film presents as more of a Gen Z rom-com – a genre that is typically (and perhaps unfairly) given the straight-to-streaming treatment. My Old Ass plays on rom-com cliches while equally subverting them with its boy-meets-lesbian storyline and plenty of quippy dialogue that is too niche for Netflix.
It’s a film that you could happily watch at a sleepover with five teenagers, and yet also watch with your cinephile boyfriend who would never be caught dead watching To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. Luckily, that’s also the takeaway writer-director Megan Park wants for her audience: “Life can be hard and shitty sometimes,” she said after the credits rolled at the premiere of My Old Ass at Sundance Film Festival. “I wanted to just really have an escape [from that] with this film.”
Do not expect My Old Ass to push any boundaries, because that’s not the intention. Watching it through the lens of a rom-com rather than an A24-style film will give you the space to appreciate all it has to offer. While the characters can feel somewhat two-dimensional at times, there are plenty of laughs to compensate.
This rings true for Elliott’s character, who feels somewhat more Jojo Siwa-inspired than an accurate portrayal of the complexities that come with being a queer woman. While Elliott’s drug-induced confession that she wanted to be Justin Bieber growing up is hilarious, it feels like an almost too easy way of giving her a queer backstory – especially since the main love interest is a man.
However, it’s also worth noting that world-building for Gen Z is tricky to master. This is the first generation that grew up with the internet, and given how fast things move in this chronically online world, being on the pulse is more difficult than ever.
Very rarely can a film capture the energy of Gen Z without feeling forced and cringey, yet My Old Ass manages to get it right – and our jorts wearing protagonist Elliott is a testament to that.
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