Sundance 2024: Aubrey Plaza wins in quirky coming-of-age comedy My Old Ass

Editor's note: this review of Megan Park’s My Old Ass, which recently premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, contains spoilers.

My Old Ass, written and directed by Megan Park, stars Maisy Stella as 18-year-old Elliott Labrant, a girl who can’t wait to leave her parents’ Canadian cranberry farm for the big city of Toronto.

When she and her friends (Maddie Ziegler and Kerrice Brooks) decide to try mushrooms, Elliott meets her future, 39-year-old self (played by a hilariously deadpan Aubrey Plaza) while tripping.

Older Elliott is reluctant to give younger Elliott any specifics about her future, but does give her a little bit of advice: spend more time with your family, and avoid a boy named Chad.

At first, Elliott doesn’t seem worried about Chad, as she’s identified as a lesbian for basically her entire life. Then, she meets the quirky and gangly “summer boy” who’s spending the season working on her parents’ farm in order to reconnect with his own family’s history as cranberry farmers.

Elliott and Chad make a cute couple, and their chemistry is great, especially as Elliott tries to push Chad away only for him to be even more charming as she does. When we finally learn why older Elliott wanted her younger self to avoid him, we can’t help but root for the couple.

Plaza is great, as always, and even though she and Stella look nothing alike, through their performances you come to believe they could be the same person.

The one aspect of the story that fell flat for me was the exploration of Elliiott’s sexuality. For the first part of the film, she seems firm in her attraction to only girls, and even talks about how she’s always “only been into girls.” However, her attraction to and hookups with girls seem superficial, including when she finally hooks up with the girl she’s long had a crush on only to realize it's unsatisfying and that “sometimes the things we want aren’t what we actually want.”

Then she meets Chad, a cis, straight, white boy working on her family’s cranberry farm, and she falls in love for real for the very first time. These aren’t just hookups with the girl who works at the dock, this is real. Yes, she’s only 18, so it’s unlikely she would’ve been madly in love with many people before, but her relationship with Chad plays out like a first love, not an expansion of her sexuality.

It’s a journey that many bisexual women go on – only feeling attraction to girls until they meet a guy who becomes an exception – and Elliott and her queer friend Ro have a great conversation about how labels are fluid and liking a boy doesn’t make a queer girl less queer. Those are important messages, especially in an age when labels and sexuality are being increasingly policed from within the queer community. Still, for a character who seemingly was an out a proud lesbian, it seems like her relationship with Chad is different. Like kissing a boy and having “dick sex” for the first time have awakened something in her that kissing girls didn’t and couldn’t. Like being with a boy has shown her for the first time what real love is.

For a more nuanced look at the same kind of sexual journey, I’d suggest Rhys Ernst’s 2019 gem Adam.

Overall, My Old Ass will charm many audiences and has a big heart at its center, but its exploration of teen sexuality falls a little flat and may not resonate with all queer viewers.

My Old Ass recently premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.