‘My Old Ass’: Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella Mirror Each Other in Poignant Coming-of-Age Fable

Alci Rengifo

Reaching 40 seems so distant when you’re merely 18. Then you arrive at certain milestones where the cliché “time flies” becomes cruelly true and obvious. Millennial filmmakers have been particularly obsessed with these realities about life, increasingly telling stories about nostalgia and looking back. No doubt it is because, for this generation, aging has been taking place in shifting times where the old goal posts keep moving. “My Old Ass” is a fun yet sobering coming-of-age film that imagines bridging the gap between a life barely getting started and one that has clocked in enough miles to impart some advice. It makes absolute sense that director Megan Park was born in 1986. The sincerity of the material stems from an artist channeling a dialogue with her generation and Gen-Z.

Park also delivers one of the year’s great new discoveries with Maisy Stella as Elliott, who is about to leave her picturesque family and farm for college. To celebrate her 18th birthday, Elliott and friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) go into the woods and take mushrooms. Once the shrooms kick in and the girls start tripping, Elliott is stunned to see her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) appear next to the campfire. Older Elliott has some surprising news from the future. Not only is she not married with children, she’s still a PhD student. The major warning she has for her younger self is that you can’t get time back. She also alerts younger Elliott to stay away from a guy named Chad. Believing the trip is over, Elliott tries to carry on as normal the next day until Chad (Percy Hynes White) does indeed appear. How much of her older self’s advice should Elliott take? 

That question takes on a wonderful double meaning as the story progresses. So far, Megan’s work as a director has been preoccupied with the perils of youth. The Canadian began as a young actor before debuting directorially in 2022 with “The Fallout,” a meditative drama about two high schoolers who bond after surviving a mass shooting. Public violence is one major concern for millennials and Gen Z, who came of age under the shadow of Columbine, now Park wonderfully evokes our uncertainties about age. Park’s screenplay is so sharp it can easily sidestep any overly complicated explanations for its premise. We don’t really care to know how older Elliott is able to communicate with the 18-year-old version through an iPhone. It works like a 21st century fable. Though, if you pay closer attention to a later exchange between the two, there is a hilariously obvious answer for how the 39-year-old is able to cross time.

Logical questions in the background, “My Old Ass” grabs with its understanding of being young or looking back. For Elliott, 39 already sounds like middle age (which it technically can be depending on one’s interpretation), a notion that frightens her older self who insists she’s a “very young adult.” Both are written with intelligence. Young Elliott is vivacious, can handle herself and is certain she is gay, especially since she keeps hooking up with the hot girl who works the counter at a local shop. Aubrey’s Elliott is a woman in her late 30s who is also a clear product of these times. She laughs at the idea of having it all together by 40 and warns that in the future no one is allowed to have more than two kids. It’s a wonderful pairing because each actor must perform in a way that shows enough lingering details of the other. You may be more mature and a little wiser as you get older, but those small ticks or speech habits from youth have a way of sticking. 

Older Elliott brings some advice that may sound familiar and sensible, like asking her younger self to be nicer to their mom (Maria Dizzia) or spend more time with their younger, golfer brother (Seth Isaac Johnson). Park doesn’t sink into clichés, never turning the older woman into some kind of sage. She still carries fresh insecurities fueled by later life experiences. What seems like catastrophe at 18 gets replaced by even bigger emotional and life hassles later on. The difference is younger Elliott still has that special freedom of early adulthood where the world is waiting to be discovered. This applies to sex as well. Once she meets Chad, who is genuinely nice and almost too good of a person, Elliott begins to question her self-imposed sexual labels. Their connection is completely organic, so much so that Elliott tries to push him away but can’t. It isn’t about discovering she’s not gay but how Gen-Z is discarding binaries because they have no room when the heart takes a sudden turn. Such adventurism gets watered down as the years force us to become more reserved or cautious. We begin to value security and cherish stability.

The special lesson Park eventually brings across is that youth and aged experience need each other. Elliott is warned to cherish things we take for granted in our youth, such as the idyllic home her parents have built. Such places feel like they will last forever until fate cruelly teaches us they don’t. Yet, older Elliott needs to learn not to let pain make her jaded. Her warnings about Chad turn out to be based on the kind of development that could happen to anyone, but if we linger over it, nobody would ever dare like someone again. Considering how the world has been developing over the last few decades, it’s no surprise there is such an obsession with nostalgia. Even in cinema, remakes and reboots dominate because we want to escape back to familiar entertainments from thirty years ago or more. “My Old Ass” is a perfect parable for now in how it celebrates who we were and who we will all be. Time is unstoppable. Park isn’t trying to push the clock back, her film is about the need to not let go of what shaped us while not being afraid of our ticking clocks.

“My Old Ass” releases Sept. 13 in select theaters and expands Sept. 27 nationwide.