My Old Ass review – Aubrey Plaza adds texture to the comedy about a teenager meeting his future self | Films

This film by Canadian director Megan Park starts very well; It's obviously a body-swapping adventure with lots of promised laughs starring Aubrey Plaza, and her prominent presence alone made the film one of the most appealing films of the fall. But mysteriously and frighteningly, My Old Ass turns into a sloppy, limp, pulpy young adult fantasy romance that ultimately fails to reach its own conclusion, and we are denied the actual big conclusion, without which the entire story is a pointless one would have been a waste of time. (I suspect an earlier draft of the script had this ending, but Park changed his mind.)

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 start studying in Toronto, but is enjoying a wonderful romance with a girl who works in a cafe. Then Elliott is doing magic mushrooms with some friends and has a crazy epiphany/vision: her super cool, cynical self, played by Plaza, appears to her. After much excited conversation, including an assessment of the relative firmness of their respective asses, and with a lot of sullen and adult teenage annoyance on the older Elliott's part at this forced intimacy with her former self, she finally agrees to give the young Elliott a tip: Hold Stay away from a guy named Chad. And the next day, when Elliott wakes up from what she's now convinced was just a lucid dream, she meets a cute guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White), who's super annoying but super nice and… well yeah…you know.

Plaza's natural toughness gives this film some structure, but the truth is that she doesn't appear in it much. One can spend very, very long periods of time longing for it to reappear. So when she doesn't, it feels boring.