‘My Old Ass’: What Do You Tell Your Younger Self? And What If You Grow Up to Be Aubrey Plaza?

What were you like when you were 18 years old, high on the feeling that your life was a blank canvas spread out in front of you, and you could throw whatever paint splatters you wanted on it? Maybe, like Elliott (Maisy Stella), the hero of My Old Ass, you were literally high on more than a feeling, courtesy of some mushrooms that her best friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) procured. It’s the summer before she’s leaving her rural hometown in the backwoods of Ontario for her first year of college in Toronto, and she and her pals want to collectively blow their minds together in the woods. These are how memories are made, the kind that last a lifetime — even if the exact details about, say, an army of imaginary bunnies emerging from the forest during your trip remain a little fuzzy.

Or maybe, like Elliott, you get so high that you suddenly find yourself talking to a 39-year-old woman who appears out of nowhere, sitting next to you by the campfire and introducing herself by saying, “Hey, freak!” The teen has no idea who this stranger is, but the mystery guest knows exactly what’s going on with this kid — because she is her. Rather, she’s Older Elliott (Aubrey Plaza), inexplicably summoned from the future courtesy of Younger Elliott chugging some highly hallucinogenic tea. She’s not here to warn her teen self of some upcoming A.I.-generated war pitting man against machine, and she must come with her if she wants to live. She has not traveled back in time to find a cure for a virus released by the Army of 12 Monkeys. Older Elliott is content to just kick back with Younger Elliott and shoot the shit, gamely entertaining a request for a peck on the lips — because who wouldn’t want to know what it’s like to kiss yourself? — and telling her to do more stuff with her (sorry, their) Mom. “The only thing you can’t get back,” Older Elliott says, in between snarky banter, “is time.”

A sleeper hit at this year’s Sundance and already gathering beaucoup buzz during its limited run in New York and Los Angeles (it opens wide on September 27th), writer-director Megan Park’s wry dramedy takes what’s usually a science fiction thriller scenario and gently, deftly flips it on its head. There are a few nods to this subgenre’s dystopian roots, with Older Elliott capping an ode to their dad’s cooking with “I miss salmon, eat as much as you can while it’s still around,” and the ominous sound of air-raid sirens in the background of a phone call from the future. (More on that in a second.) But what Park is going for isn’t paranoid hand-wringing or some sort of cautionary tale. It’s an excuse for a therapy session, shoving the concept of self-care into beautifully absurdist, cross-generational territory. Older Elliott wants to impart words of hard-earned wisdom to her teen counterpart and drop some carpe diem science. Her 18-year-old self is curious about what she’ll do over the next 21 years. Mostly, however, she just wants to grope “my old ass” to see how badly she’s aged.

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It’s part of a growing tradition of “If I only knew then what I know now” movies, some of which involve time loops and wormholes, others that invoke the supernatural, and a handful of which simply throw logic out the window in search of profound notions about life, the universe and everything. What My Old Ass really aims to be is something like a Gen-Z Groundhog Day, borrowing a fantastical conceit without getting in the weeds regarding the details and diving into more philosophical yet personal waters. Younger Elliott reads as a 21st century teen, one who’s not hung up on labels and treats queerness as a no-big-deal given — the fact that she’s finally hooking up with a girl who’s she’s been “flirting with since we were eight” is a big bucket-list item to check. She also suffers from the same existential angst and self-involvement that every teenager in every decade of the past 60 years has dealt with, from the need to distinguish herself from her family to itching to leave her pastoral roots for potentially greener metropolitan pastures. Elliott is a recognizable archetype. Thanks to Park’s writing and Stella’s ridiculously charismatic performance, she’s anything but a generic one.

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In fact, despite the peripheral quirkiness and rando outré touches — her younger brother is obsessed with Saorise Ronan, there’s a drug-induced recreation of Justin Bieber’s live-show rose giveaways during “One Less Lonely Girl” — My Old Ass works best when it’s content to simply be a casual hang-out movie dotted with deep-thought conversations. Elliott’s rapport with her friends feels remarkably natural, almost (but not quite) as if you’re eavesdropping on private chats between best buds. The push-pull tension between the teen and her mother (Maria Dizzia) is equally organic. And though their scenes together are way too brief, the Older and Younger Elliott bull sessions give the movie both a spiky-humor rush and a sense of genuine grounding. What if you could go back and tell your younger self a few things to know about what’s coming their way? And what if this older, wiser you was Aubrey Plaza, rolling her eyes and throwing actual self-owning shade like a pro, yet still felt like the cooler big-sister-slash-mentor you never had?

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Right, so: Remember when we mentioned that phone-call thing? It turns out that the Older Elliott slipped her phone number into Younger Elliott’s cell, and surprise! You can apparently talk to your older self across the time-space continuum. (We assume this requires a special coverage plan, feel free to ask your own mobile-service provider for details.) This comes in handy regarding the one thing that Older Elliott tells Younger Elliott to explicitly avoid: anyone named Chad. Soon, some handsome, gangly guy (Percy Hynes White) interrupts the young woman’s dip at the local swimming hole. He’s working on her family’s cranberry farm for the summer, and has roots among the locals. Younger Elliott slowly finds herself falling for him. Anyone care to guess what his name is?

There’s a reason why Older Elliott has warned her younger self against this person, and why she’s unable to offer true counsel when the two Elliotts talk on the phone. And this is where Park’s film both reduces itself to becoming a rather standard, if still charming rom-com, and touches a serious nerve when it comes to not only marching forward toward your malleable future but looking back at the regrets of your own personal history. Without saying too much, it also leads to a sequence in which Plaza reminds you that she is truly a stunning actor when it comes to communicating without a word. You go into this thinking it’s about one young woman, only to find it’s really a tale of two Elliotts. My Old Ass can’t help itself when it comes to mashing your emotional buttons or threading platitudes into its high-concept goofiness: life is what you make it, you have to fully live it, you only get one family, etc. It also can’t help but win you over when Stella and Plaza are you letting you see two sides of this young woman, and in the process, make you reflect on your own inner multitudes. You can’t change your past. But you certainly can honor it, even when you give your younger self endless shit and reinforce the idea that moisturizing early pays off in the long run.