geezer cinema/film fatales #216: my old ass (megan park, 2024)

Megan Park's feature debut as a writer-director was 2021's The Fallout, a very good film about which I wrote:

Park's directing debut is confident ... there are no signs of first-timers disease. She tells the story as she wants, gets the performances she wants, creates a believable world of high-schoolers, and even makes the adults seem true-to-life, neither ogres nor saints.... Park doesn't reach too far, which just adds to the powerful nature of what we see.

I could say the same about My Old Ass, which features actors portraying believable teenagers and reasonable adults. But the tone of My Old Ass is different from its predecessor. The Fallout was about trauma, and while that topic sneaks in the backdoor at the end, My Old Ass is a more standard coming-of-age story. And where The Fallout was realistic enough to require a trigger warning at the beginning, My Old Ass drops a fantasy element into what is otherwise a straightforward account of the blossoming of a young woman. In My Old Ass, Elliott (a delightful Maisy Stella) does mushrooms and encounters her own self from 20 years into the future. That the older Elliott is played by Aubrey Plaza only adds to the enjoyment, although Plaza fans should note she is only a supporting actor here.

The time-travel angle doesn't always make sense, but Park explains it in such a way that we go along with it anyway. The obvious questions arise, as the previews make clear: if you could talk to yourself from a different age, what would you want to know, and what if you could change everything? What's nice is that, once again, Park doesn't reach too far ... the questions arise, but in the middle of a feel-good movie about youth. It's not too smarmy and it's not too serious until the end.

Park's background is interesting ... she's been a musician and an actor, and now she has two solid feature films to her credit. She is definitely someone to keep an eye on.