I’ve said this before in other reviews, but often my favorite thing is when a smaller movie can come out of nowhere and completely blow me away. Writer/director Megan Park has done that twice now. First, the SXSW hit that put her on the list of filmmakers to watch, The Fallout, a film I highly recommend you check out if you haven’t seen – available now on Max – which brings me to her sophomore film, the film we’re discussing today. My Old Ass, produced by Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment, was a big hit at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It sparked a bidding war, and the film was eventually sold to MGM for a record $15 million. This film has fought an uphill battle to get in front of audiences on the big screen, and yet it totally snuck up on me. And at this time, My Old Ass is one of the best films I’ve seen in 2024 to date.

18-year-old Elliott (Maisy Stella) lives in rural Canada with her parents, and it’s the last summer before she goes off to Toronto for college. One night she goes off into the woods with her friends (Kerrice Brooks and Maddie Zeigler) and gets high on mushrooms. Suddenly, she is visited by her older, 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza), who has lots of advice to offer. She is told to spend more time with her brothers, to not take her parents for granted, and to steer clear of a guy named Chad (Percy Hynes White). Maddie uses this existential experience as an opportunity to potentially change the course of where her life will go.

My Old Ass is asking big questions, profound questions. This is something we’ve all thought about, the question of ‘if you could give your younger self a piece of advice, what would you tell them?’ And when a film has such lofty ambitions, and is aiming for something so profound, it will often squander that opportunity and not give the viewer anything meaningful to take away from it. My Old Ass does not do this. The emotional truth that Megan Park achieves in this banger of a screenplay is close to unparalleled. I went into this film expecting to enjoy it – I love Aubrey Plaza, and I liked The Fallout a great deal. I was not prepared to be utterly destroyed by the film I was about to see. Destroyed in the best ways, ways that when you leave the theater, you feel like some parts of you, deep within your soul, have been healed. Parts that maybe you didn’t even know were broken. 

Maisy Stella was a series regular on the show Nashville, but other than that and some music she’s produced, she’s a newcomer. This is her first feature film, and she feels like the most exciting kind of Hollywood discovery. The distinctly gen Z-ness of her line deliveries, to her comedic timing, to the chemistry with her co-stars, to the way she handles the script’s emotional wallops with grace, this is nothing short of a star making performance. She is so engaging and has such a warm, familiar presence, and you can’t take your eyes off her. 

Stella kind of looks nothing like Aubrey Plaza, but as a viewer you get over that pretty quickly. And Plaza only shows up in two sequences of this story, and a lot of the heavy lifting of this narrative is left to Stella. But Plaza has carved out such a specific space for herself in film, and she continues to pick fascinating projects. And she’s terrific here, also tasked with handling some very comedic and dramatic moments. I never thought the deadpan-ness of an Aubrey Plaza performance would bring me to full-on body chills with tears streaming, but that day has come.

In the supporting cast, we have Maria Dizzia as Elliott’s mother, who has that prerequisite coming-of-age movie monologue in the third act that promises to start the waterworks, and it absolutely does. Kerrice Brooks, as Elliott’s friend Ro, has such a warmth in her presence and you really do buy that these two are lifelong friends. Percy Hynes White as Chad, the tall and lanky dreamboat Elliott is told to stay far away from, is also extremely charismatic and engaging to watch, and you really understand Elliott’s dilemma regarding whether or not she gives him the time of day. They have a chemistry that’s pretty electric from the jump.

There is so much My Old Ass is trying to do. It’s asking big questions about the way we see ourselves, how we are to each other, how we process time, and how we perceive present, past and future versions of ourselves, and what our actions mean, and if we’re bound for a predetermined outcome regardless of what we do about it. And that’s a lot for a scrappy little Sundance darling to wrap its head around. But the answers we get are as murky and as open to interpretation as those questions themselves, and I feel like that’s very much the point. Megan Park manages to wrap this all up with a life-affirming bow by the time we leave the theater, but she’s allowing for the nuances and the mysteries of those questions to take center stage. And the message we’re left with is one we’ve seen before, but it’s a message impeccably delivered. Embrace the mistakes you make. Allow yourself the grace to be young and dumb. Because as older Elliott says at a point, ‘the only thing you can’t get back is time. It goes by so fast.’