Aubrey Plaza, Maisy Stella on trauma, life lessons and cringey kiss in ‘My Old Ass’
Director Megan Park’s second feature, starring Aubrey Plaza and Maisy Stella, takes an inventive approach to asking questions about fate and forgiving oneself.
Megan Park’s “My Old Ass” isn’t the first film to ask whether it would be better to have a warning about what life has in store. But the borderline-sci-fi film set in an Ontario lake town, which stars Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza alongside a multigenerational cast of veteran and first-time actors, may be the first to do it via a kiss between a protagonist’s younger and older selves.
The Sundance hit, which releases in theaters nationwide Friday, appears to be a somewhat formulaic coming-of-age story about the summer after high school, until its 18-year-old protagonist (Stella) is visited by her 39-year-old self (Plaza) during a mushroom trip. The encounter and kiss lead to a surreal series of phone calls during which the older Elliott tries to help her younger self avoid a defining, early-life trauma — a subject Park also explored in her 2021 debut feature, “The Fallout,” starring Jenna Ortega as a teenager whose life is transformed by a school shooting.
“It wasn’t actually intentional for them to both be centered around that, but it’s definitely a theme in both,” Park told NBC News in a joint interview with the stars of “My Old Ass,” referring to her films' framing tragedy as a core adolescent experience.
Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza in "My Old Ass."Amazon MGM Studios“When I was writing ‘The Fallout,’ I was just flabbergasted as a millennial who grew up in Canada. I was, like, ‘I can’t believe this is actually happening in America — this is a fear that you have to face,’” she said of gun violence in schools. “With [‘My Old Ass’], it actually didn’t start with the idea of loss; it was more this feeling of nostalgia.”
Park, a former actor who developed an interest in writing and directing on set, was inspired to pen the script for her second feature after moving back home during the pandemic and having her first baby. As a new mother who was sleeping in her childhood bed, she said, she was struck for the first time by the feeling of “time being your greatest enemy” and wanted to capture that in a film that married humor with heaviness, to make it more digestible for audiences. That led her to the story of a soon-to-be college student whose summer of saying goodbye to her best friends (Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks) and wooing the cute dock girl is hijacked by unexpectedly falling for a boy (Percy Hynes White), making an effort to get to know her family and having weighty conversations with her older self.
Rating: 5