My Old Ass

Megan Park’s sophomore effort stars Canadian singer and TV star Maisy Stella as a plucky 18-year-old living in an idyllic rural Northern lake area where she and her family harvest cranberries. At the end of her last summer, before heading to college, she and some friends go on a camping/shroom trip where she gets magically visited by her 39-year-old self in the form of Aubrey Plaza. Her “old ass” gives her some advice that she, of course, doesn’t listen to and maybe doesn’t need to anyway.

My Old Ass is one of those pleasantly unchallenging and utterly forgettable 90-minute indies that serve as welcome palette-cleansers between dark, heavy, 2+ hour prestige pictures at film festivals. On that score, it's enjoyable. But as a night out at the movies, it's a bit too lightweight to recommend. Any fan of Plaza (and who isn't a fan?) will have difficulty accepting that she could ever have been like Stella when she was a teenager. One of the points the film makes is that we are different people at the end of our teen years than we are when we're about to turn 40. But are we as fundamentally different as these two actresses are? Also, this is a very Millennial movie, and isn't one of that generation's foundational beliefs that "people don't really change?"

The film fits in the genre of magical realism, not fantasy or sci-fi, so it doesn't matter how two versions of the same person can coexist across time or what the ramifications are of giving your young self advice from the future. Park uses her premise to have fun with her characters, embracing how wonderful it is to be "young and dumb" (even though young people are really quite wise, don't ya know). Her structure is about as low-stakes as you can imagine, but it's somewhat original in that there are no forces of antagonism, and the protagonist doesn't change at all—except she does by way of the film's central conceit. Still, if you were expecting this movie to consist of an almost 90-minute conversation between the same person at different life stages, as I was), you'll be surprised and disappointed at how much this is not that film.