My Old Ass (2024) Review: Despite Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza’s Great Performances, Megan Park Botches the Potential to Embrace the High-Concept Coming-of-Age Dramedy

My Old Ass might sound like a juvenile, gross-out comedy but writer-director Megan Park’s follow-up to The Fallout is actually a coming-of-age dramedy about 18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella, best known for her role as Daphne Conrad in TV’s Nashville), who has been anticipating the days of leaving her idyllic Canadian hometown of Muskoka Lakes to go to college.

So, we see her spending her remaining days with her best friends Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks) getting high on an island with shrooms. While the two already started hallucinating after drinking the shroom tea, Elliott feels surprised it doesn’t work on her. Or at least that’s what she thinks until she is shocked to find a woman appearing out of nowhere and sitting beside her on a log.

That woman in question happens to be a 39-year-old future self, played by Aubrey Plaza. The younger Elliott figures the shrooms work its magic after all but it feels too real. She learns from her titular “old ass” about what to expect in terms of her career and personal life down the road. The conversation between the present and future Elliott keeps me invested in their characters with Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza delivering instant chemistry together.

For a while there, Park’s high-concept premise about what if you meet your future self resulted in an interesting setup that I’m looking forward to seeing where the story would go next. But after the promising first act, Park does the impossible as she wastes the potential to play safe with the typical coming-of-age storytelling tropes. This makes me wonder why abandon such a good concept and settle for the all-too-familiar route. It was as if Park got this cool idea about a young girl meeting a future, older self but somehow couldn’t find a way to stretch it further into a full-length feature.

The rest of the story focuses more on Elliott’s unexpected romance with a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White). It was the particular name that her “old ass” warned her earlier to avoid Chad at all costs but of course, it’s hard for Elliott to ignore his existence no matter how hard she try. The story also addressed Elliott’s sexuality as a queer but after getting to know Chad, things gradually change. I was hoping for Park to fully embrace the high-concept premise since there are so many potential angles to see the present and future Elliott together throughout the oddly fascinating coming-of-age journey.

But Plaza is more of a glorified cameo in this movie and even barely qualifies as a supporting role. What a big, missed opportunity it turns out to be because Plaza is great in her role and she certainly deserves a bigger role. Her absence is sorely felt throughout the movie and even though she did reappear later, it’s just too late and too little.

This leaves Stella to shoulder most of the burden here when comes to the acting part. She delivers a vibrant performance as the younger Elliott who only cares about herself all this while until the strange appearance of her older self changes her perspective. We see how she starts to pay more attention to her parents, particularly her mum (Maria Dizzia) and her brothers. There’s a spark in her chemistry with Percy Hynes White, who gives a charming supporting turn as Chad.

The movie equally benefits from other supporting cast including Kerrice Brooks, Maddie Ziegler and Seth Isaac Johnson, where the latter plays Elliott’s high-school brother who likes to play golf. And yet, for a coming-of-age story, I find Park’s overall storytelling is too rigid with the formula.

My Old Ass is currently streaming on Prime Video.