The common belief goes: “If I had it to do all over again, I would do everything differently.” The scenario presented in Megan Park’s My Old Ass offers something similar in notion, albeit with a very specific means for altering the course of your life. That specific means being: miraculously conjuring your older self back through time via a mushroom-induced drug trip. So no, it’s not quite like Daryl Wein and Zoe Lister-Jones’ How It Ends.
Opening with an eighteen-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella)—turning eighteen on this day, in fact—riding a boat through the waters of Lake Muskoka with her two best friends, Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks), the impression that Park immediately wants to give is that this is a girl on the brink of truly experiencing her life. And that she is, about to leave her small cranberry farming town to attend school in Toronto (Canada’s proverbial big city). Naturally, with Park herself being from Lindsay, Ontario (a just under two-hour drive to Lake Muskoka), one can’t help but question how much of the narrative is autobiographical. As her second feature following 2021’s The Fallout, Park goes even “smaller” in subject matter and place, homing in on a time in one’s life when everything still feels full of promise and hope—arguably the last time it ever does. So imbued with the adrenaline of youth and enthusiasm for the future is Elliott that she gushes to her friends, “The world is literally our fucking oyster—like, we’ve gotta live, you know what I mean?”
It is with that sense of overconfident hope that Elliott meets her “old ass” (played by Aubrey Plaza, the go-to actress when a director wants “jaded”) in the woods of Maud Island by a campfire. Because the “logic” of Older Elliott’s ability to appear is never addressed, it’s left to the viewer to decide how much of her “cameo” is related to drugs or actual time travel. That said, Plaza is no stranger to the “offbeat” science fiction-y/time travel genre, having appeared in 2012’s Safety Not Guaranteed. Perhaps allured by it once again because of how bittersweetly it is presented by Park within this “coming of age” context (Margot Robbie, too, was clearly allured by it, with her company, LuckyChap Entertainment, assisting in production).
And as Elliott starts to get to know her older self over roasted marshmallows in front of the campfire, Plaza’s version of Older Elliott is the perfect person to ruin Elliott’s mushroom trip with her “bad vibes.” This when she seems to struggle with having anything good to say about “the future” (a.k.a. her present)—which prompts Elliott to ramble, “This is turning into a bad trip. I feel this is turning into a bad trip. And I’m trying to have a good time and you’re giving me a fucking panic attack.”
Older Elliott calms her down a bit, but still doesn’t do much to convince her that things are “going great” in the future. And then there are Park’s constant allusions to a seeming accepted state of apocalypse in said future, with sirens going off in the background on Older Elliott’s side of the phone when Elliott calls her (or Older Elliott mentioning that she misses chemicals in food). That’s right, she’s able to call herself after Older Elliott decides to put her phone number (contact name: My Old Ass) in Elliott’s phone on a whim. Here, too, no logic need be explained. It simply is what it is: a glitch in the matrix.
Nonetheless, Older Elliott isn’t exactly “having fun” with the concept—the prospect of being able to tell her younger self a few things that could make her life easier in the future. Instead, she fears it might affect her “karma” or disrupt the natural order à la Back to the Future. And yes, it is one of those classic tropes that to change one thing about your past alters everything—not just what you wanted to amend—about your future. Even so, the one piece of advice that Older Elliott is willing to give Elliot is this: “Can you avoid anyone named Chad?”
Elliott truly can’t believe that, out of all the “tidbits” Older Elliott could offer, this is what she has to provide, chastising, “You have one chance to tell your younger self your biggest life regrets and you ask me to avoid someone named Chad?” To be fair though, that’s just solid advice in general, considering a Chad is the male version of a Karen. But, apparently, Older Elliott has her reasons. Reasons the viewer assumes will relate to him turning out to be a cad and predictably breaking her heart. However, the “big twist” about her attraction to Chad (who materializes soon after Older Elliott’s warning while Elliott is skinny dipping in the lake) is that, up until meeting him, Elliott assumed she was just a “full-on” lesbian, never imagining she might have bi predilections that would lead her to have feelings for a boy.
Granted, this particular boy is slightly on the effete side (complete with his shoulder-length hair), leading to a comical moment wherein Elliott gets to enact her ultimate Justin Bieber fantasy (on yet another mushroom trip) by, no, not being the girl picked from the audience to go onstage with him as he serenades “One Less Lonely Girl” and hands out roses, but rather, being Bieber himself. And giving Chad the rose bouquet as she sports her own “loverboy” energy.
Subverting sexuality and gender role expectations in subtle ways like this is one of many elements that makes My Old Ass an unconventional romance and coming-of-age story. Along with the little romance Elliott sort of has with Older Elliott, requesting that the two at least share a small kiss so that Elliott can know what it’s like to kiss herself. Ah, the heightened narcissism of youth.
Although Elliott tries her best to needle Older Elliott into telling her what’s so wrong with Chad, she does not relent. At least, not until the very end when Elliott has chosen to make the same “mistake” Older Elliott did and fall head over heels for Chad. But how can it really be a mistake if what Elliott got/gets out of it was/is right at the time? This is something that Elliott ends up needing to teach her older self—that “if you weren’t young and dumb, you’d never fucking be brave enough to do anything. If you knew how shitty and unfair life would be, you’d never leave your house. You’d never enjoy spending time with anyone because you’d just be thinking about the fact that they’re gonna die someday. But when you’re young and dumb, you don’t even think about that. And that’s what lets you actually live.”
So while Older Elliott’s intent was merely to protect herself from experiencing the pain, it is the wisdom of young Elliott that makes her realize no version of herself should live for anything but the present—because that, in the end, is all anyone has. It might be a trite cliché, but it’s one that isn’t emphasized all that often anymore, especially as most people are so obsessed with “documenting the moment” that they never really are “present in the present.”
“What would you ask your older self?” goes the tagline for My Old Ass. Ultimately, though, it seems that encountering one’s younger self might extend more wisdom in terms of reminding us that, once upon a time, before we were beaten down by life and conditioned to be afraid of it, we were fearless. Ready to conquer anything and unafraid of getting hurt in the process.
