“My Old Ass” is the story of an 18-year-old woman named Elliott (Maisy Stella) who lives on a cranberry farm in Canada with her parents, but will be leaving soon to go to college in Toronto.
One night, she and two friends do mushrooms for the first time. While her friends are having their own hallucinations, Elliott is visited by a woman who turns out to be her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza). After getting past the initial shock, young Elliott begs older Elliott to tell her what to expect in her future. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going to refer to them as YE and OE from here on out.
OE is reluctant to tell YE too much, keeping her advice simple (e.g. “Wear your retainer!”), but as YE keeps pleading for something more substantial, OE finally tells her to “stay away from anyone named Chad.”
Of course, it doesn’t take more than five minutes for her to meet a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White). He’s been hired to help out around the farm, and from their first glance, it’s clear these two are attracted to each other. YE tries to heed OE’s warning, but Chad is a good-looking decent guy, and she can’t avoid falling into a relationship with him.
If you saw the posters and trailer for “My Old Ass,” you’d think Stella and Plaza are co-stars sharing the screen throughout the movie. But Plaza is not on camera for much of the story. Instead, we only occasionally hear her voice through YE’s cell phone (yep, she can call her future self because OE slipped her phone number into YE’s contacts and labelled herself “My Old Ass”). However, there is one scene towards the end of the story in which Plaza displays a remarkable range of emotions. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but it’s the best thing I’ve seen her do.
The real star of “My Old Ass” is Stella, who is in every scene and has a face the camera absolutely loves. Writer/director Megan Park frames her perfectly, with light (both natural and artificial) giving her a movie star glow which reminded of the first time I saw Florence Pugh on screen. She has that same charisma and shares a nice chemistry with White. In addition, Park and her cinematographer shot some of the most beautiful scenes of life on a big lake that I’ve seen since Mark Rydell’s work in “On Golden Pond.”
“My Old Ass” took about twenty minutes to draw me in because the time-travel aspect seemed a bit lazy at first. But then it turned into a clever combination of a coming-of-age story and a tearjerker, with writing, direction, and performances that left a smile on my face.
“My Old Ass” is a nice, small, indie movie I heartily recommend with a rating of 8.5 out of 10. It has been in limited release for two weeks, but opens in more theaters this Friday.