My Old Ass Review – Aubrey Plaza Adds Texture to Teen Meets Future Self Comedy

This film by Canadian director Megan Park starts very well; it’s an ostensible body-swapping adventure with plenty of promised laughs starring Aubrey Plaza, and her heralded presence alone made it one of the fall’s most compelling films. But mystifying and dismaying, My Old Ass turns into a bleak, limp, supple young adult fantasy novel that ultimately fails to reach its own ending, and we are denied the actual big finish, without which the entire story would have been a pointless waste of time. . (I suspect an earlier script draft had that ending, but Park was unsure.)

Park imagines a teenager named Elliott (Maisy Stella), whose parents run a cranberry farm; It’s the end of summer and she’s about to go to college in Toronto, but enjoys a glorious romance with a girl who works in a coffee shop. Then Elliott does magic mushrooms with some friends and has a crazy epiphany/vision: her super-cool, cynical 39-year-old self, played by Plaza, appears to her. After much panicked conversation, including an assessment of the relative firmness of their respective asses, and with much grumpy and adult-teenage resentment from the older Elliott over this forced intimacy with her former self, she finally agrees to let the young Elliott to give it a chance. advice: stay away from a man named Chad. And the next day, once Elliott wakes up from what she’s now convinced was just a lucid dream, she cutely meets a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White), who’s super annoying but super nice and…well …you know.

Plaza’s natural toughness gives this film some texture, but the truth is she isn’t involved in it much. You can spend long, long stretches of playtime longing for her return. So when she doesn’t, it feels boring.