Directed by Maisy Stella — Screenplay by Maisy Stella.
The strange title made me very curious about what this film was, and I am glad I found the time to watch it. Megan Park’s My Old Ass is such a sweet coming-of-age film that is oozing with charm. Here we find an 18-year-old young woman (played by Maisy Stella) who, through magic mushrooms and other unexplained occurrences, finds a way to communicate with her 39-year-old self (played by Aubrey Plaza) from the future. That is about all you need to know about the film, and, even if you have reservations about watching something with unexplained timey-wimey mechanics, I would suggest that you should get over that and enjoy this film for what it is, even though I, too, sometimes, raised an eyebrow at the mechanics of it all.
I really do enjoy these types of films about meeting your older/younger self and exchanging life lessons, and, even though they are sometimes paired with cliched messages about life, love, family, and youth, I think they can be absolutely delightful when they are done right — and this one really is. Despite it later leading to a really fun sequence (but a very generation-specific reference), I am glad it opted not to merely be a movie about how this young woman takes drugs to learn about her life (mostly because that kind of hallucinogenic movie magic is kind of played out). Again, the mechanics of their communication are largely unexplained, which limits exactly how much I can become fully invested in their communication, but, frankly, the central performances are so well-tuned that I overcame those potential points of frustration.
Maisy Stella, in her first film role, is simply a revelation. She performs sensationally well, and her winning performance is the primary reason this film is so nice to watch for long stretches. Stella is super charismatic. She is, in the film’s best scenes, paired with Aubrey Plaza, who plays Stella’s character’s older self, and I thought it was really nice to see Plaza play a more toned-down character than what she is usually asked to be. Although I really enjoy her deadpan humor, it is nice to see her play a different, more mature type here, and she does a fine job. Plaza and Stella are also so good together that I would’ve happily watched just a feature-length conversation between the two.
But that isn’t what it is, it’s really more of a romance film between Stella’s character and Percy Hynes White’s Chad. Watching them together is also quite sweet, but, frankly, for a while it does really feel like merely a slightly elevated young adult romance film that you might find on a rival streaming service. Another small issue that I have with the film is that it feels like the film ends slightly prematurely. I think this was a deliberate decision so as to not be emotionally manipulative (this isn’t to say that the film isn’t emotional — it definitely is and there is a very well-designed scene toward the end that really moved me) or lose the clarity of its cliched but important central message about living life and love to their fullest, but it did, nonetheless, feel like it ended a little bit too soon.
On the whole, I thought My Old Ass was such a delightfully charming coming-of-age romantic comedy with an interesting, albeit underexplained, timey-wimey element. I will say that this also made me consider going back and finishing Megan Park’s directorial debut The Fallout, which I started back when it was first released on HBO Max, but which I, for whatever reason, didn’t finish watching. I should probably finish that, huh?
7 out of 10
– Review Written by Jeffrey Rex Bertelsen.
I'm Jeffrey Rex 