My Old Ass (2024)

Where to Watch: Prime

***1/2

The cinematic equivalent of a warm hug, My Old Ass is a charming and intelligent low-key fantasy that manages to tackle a few pretty hefty issues without ever harshing your buzz. 

The premise is pretty brilliant. On her eighteenth birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her two closest friends take a boat out to an island in the lake on the shore of which their tiny community is located. Once there, they proceed to brew up a pot of mushroom tea and get high. Now, these mushrooms are of mysterious provenance, possibly South American or South African, and the girls proceed to trip hard. Ro and Ruthie have more typical movie drug trips - full hallucinations and the like. Elliott, however, doesn't really feel any effects. Then she turns around and finds her 39 year old self (Aubrey Plaza) sitting next to her. The pair have a deep and meaningful conversation, and Old Elliott warns Young Elliott to stay away from guys named Chad. Of course once Young Elliott sobers up she basically dismisses the whole thing. But two incidents make her realise that something more is going on. First, she meets an oddly charming young man named Chad. Then, she discovers that Old Elliott has entered her number in her phone, and that Young Elliot can now carry on conversations with her older self Doctor Who style (unfortunately, the film never explains how phone calls across twenty one years of time and space are billed - I'm assuming you have to use your extras credit, as I can't see that being included with your unlimited standard calls and texts).

From this point the film just sort of plays out as a series of incidents, tied together by a careful consideration of characters and themes. As an experience, this is a good natured and likeable film, but there's quite a bit going on beneath the surface. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the premise, the character of Elliott is the most interesting thing. At its heart, My Old Ass is a film about growing up and realising that the person you thought you were is not the person you currently are. It's about how the things we take for granted can change in an instant, and what a person (especially a young person) can completely overlook simply because they're too wrapped up in themselves.

But put simply, Elliott is just a great character. A smart, beautiful kid a few weeks away from leaving her small town existence behind and attending the University of Toronto, she's nonetheless gutted when she finds out her parents are selling the family farm. As she puts it, even if she wanted to leave, she kind of always assumed that the farm would always be there to go back to. Her parents, meanwhile, just took it for granted that she didn't care about the place, and  she only finds out about the sale by accident. 

Then there's the issue of Elliott's sexuality, which is pretty clever. You see, Elliott is gay, and the community she's in has provided a sort of bubble where she's never had to deal with the harder aspects of being queer that almost certainly await her in the wider world. So when she starts developing a crush on Chad, you have a clever reversal of all those films where a straight woman realises she's attracted to women. But even better, there's never any sense that Elliott is somehow straight - as she puts it, she's deeply confused as to whether she's bi or maybe even pan. As her friend puts it, she's not any less queer just because she likes men. I always find bisexuality under represented in the media, and when it does crop up it's often been handled poorly (see Buffy the Vampire Slayer). But it's not really a question of Elliott's sexuality fitting into a neat little box, and My Old Ass does a good job of representing sexuality as something fluid and complicated in a way that rings true to life. 

The character of Chad is also handled very well. The guy is just too good to be true. Even without Old Elliott's warning, we've been trained by years of cliché narratives to suspect that anyone that nice must be harbouring some fucked-up secret. So as the film progressed and Elliott and Chad's feelings for each other grew stronger, there was  this creepy dissonance as I kept wondering what the hell the guy was going to do to fuck things up so badly that a woman would time travel to stop herself even talking to him. I won't ruin the twist, but it's pretty great even if it's also rather bittersweet. I don't know if I entirely agree with the conclusion the film draws, but I do sometimes wish I had the courage to live like that. 

All of that makes this film seem kind of heavy, but this is a light-hearted comedy and there are plenty of great jokes. There's Ruthie's description of her trip (thousands of rabbits singing in Mandarin). There's the odd little hints that Old Elliott keeps dropping about what life is like in the future, which slowly build up a picture of a world both dystopian and liveable. There's the fact that the two Elliotts look absolutely nothing alike, which Old Elliott explains away as being because Young Elliott wouldn't wear her retainer. And there are all sorts of amusing little incidents scattered throughout the film, including a big showy musical number that shouldn't work but does. Add to that solid performances all round, and My Old Ass manages to be that rare thing - a funny, smart, heart-warming film that manages to avoid ever becoming cloying. It's definitely worth a watch.