Vague Visages’ My Old Ass review contains minor spoilers. Megan Park’s 2024 movie features Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza and Maddie Ziegler. Check out the VV home page for more film reviews, along with cast/character summaries, streaming guides and complete soundtrack song listings.

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What would you give for the opportunity to chat with your future self, to get a glimpse of how your life turned out? More importantly, would knowing change anything? Megan Park, director of The Fallout (2021), proves once again her ability to tap into the teen experience with My Old Ass, representing with authenticity the journey of a girl on the verge of adulthood who is brought face-to-face with herself — just two decades older. Maisy Stella lights the screen on fire in her first starring role as the 18-year-old Elliott, bringing charisma and vulnerability to the character, while her older counterpart, Aubrey Plaza, alternates between her trademark off-kilter humor and genuine pathos in one of her most intriguing roles to date. Bittersweet and deeply poignant, My Old Ass is one of the most emotionally affecting dramedies in quite some time.

Elliott has spent her entire life on her family’s ancestral cranberry farm and counts down the days until she can move away to the city. But the protagonist’s plans take a weird turn when, on her 18th birthday, she and her two best friends (played by Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks) go into the woods to have a celebratory mushroom trip. While Elliott’s friends have a standard hallucinatory experience, she is shocked by the sudden appearance of a woman in her late 30s who claims to be her from the future. Stella’s protagonist feels even more taken aback when the drugs wear off and she finds the number of her older self saved in a cell phone under the name of “My Old Ass.” Through this connection, the two characters communicate with one another, with the older Elliott imparting valuable pearls of wisdom to her younger counterpart. Although much of her advice is purposefully vague, she has just one concrete request: to stay away from someone named Chad. The young Elliott is perplexed by this, until she runs into her family’s newest summer worker (Percy Hynes White), who just happens to be named Chad, and who she has immediate sparks with. Quite the conundrum, indeed.

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My Old Ass is an intimate, character-driven piece, which means that it relies heavily on performances for most of its appeal. Although Stella and Plaza don’t particularly look alike, they are excellent as the younger and older versions of Elliott, each putting in understated, naturalistic turns. As weird as it might seem, since the actresses play the same character, they have great chemistry together, bouncing off one another and coming across completely believable as one person at different stages in their life. Stella also works well with White, who is quietly charming in Chad’s low-key but incredibly sweet relationship with Elliott.

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This type of story feels as though it should be rooted in learning about the future — after all, Elliott is desperate for clues about how her life turned out. But My Old Ass is actually much more about appreciating every moment of the present. Throughout the film, older Elliott constantly advises her younger self to relish the relationship she has with her family, and to savor every moment of “home” because it’s so easy to take for granted. The older one gets, the more one realizes that there is no way to return to a childhood home — either it changes or you do.

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But although My Old Ass has a poignant message at its heart, that really undersells its humor. Plaza, of course, has pitch-perfect comedic timing, and gets the opportunity to drop in some bizarre, off-handed nuggets about the future that land precisely because they’re never elaborated on or explained. But Stella also gets to showcase her talent at both verbal and physical comedy as the whirling dervish that is young Elliott, who has a flair for the dramatic and an occasional lack of impulse control.

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Above all, there’s a sense of naturalism that pervades the entire production — a humility in Park’s directorial style that allows My Old Ass to maintain a winning charm. It’s never bombastic and never tries to overplay its hand with grand emotional statements, as Park finds moments of power in character-driven interactions, which are seemingly subtle but pack a massive emotional wallop. Kristen Correll’s cinematography is beautiful but understated, projecting a feeling of warmth and familiarity above all else.

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Moviegoers may not have grown up on a Canadian cranberry farm but can still relate to the sensation of leaving home for the first time, desperate for a taste of freedom, and then missing what’s been lost. My Old Ass manages to pull a bait-and-switch on the audience: it wants viewers to think that it’s focused on the future, when really it’s a quietly devastating exploration of shared bittersweet feelings of grief over the past.

Audrey Fox (@theaudreyfox) is a features editor and film/television critic at Looper, with bylines at RogerEbert.com, Nerdist, /Film and IGN, amongst other outlets. She has been blessed by the tomato overlords with their coveted seal of approval. Audrey received her BA in film from Clark University and her MA in International Relations from Harvard University. When she’s not watching movies, Audrey loves historical non-fiction, theater, traveling and playing the violin (poorly).

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