For her feature debut, Canadian actress-turned-director Megan Park wrote and directed The Fallout (2021), starring Jenna Ortega and Maddie Ziegler as high schoolers grappling with the titular state in the wake of a school shooting. With its uniquely homegrown US narrative premise, the film was praised for handling its subject matter with tenderness despite its occasionally cheesy edges. What, then, led to the coarse and clichéd big studio-backed (by Indian Paintbrush, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, and Margot Robbie’s LuckyChap Entertainment) new film that is Park’s amusingly Canadian sophomore feature, My Old Ass? Based on a fundamentally interesting conceit and what some have coined a coming-out narrative “in reverse”, the 2024 Sundance-premiered My Old Ass held the potential to blossom into a touching and lesser-seen take on sexuality with Park steering the fictional lives of those cusp teenage/adult years once again. In the result, it’s easy to see the flickering embers of what could have been more than just vaguely charming, but most of what’s left is overwritten comedic dialogue and a series of topical, one-dimensional oddities.
Just weeks before eager-to-grow-up Elliott (Maisy Stella) leaves home to attend the University of Toronto, she meets the boy-next-door college student Chad (Percy Hynes White), who is working for the summer on her parents’ Canadian cranberry farm. The film’s twists? Elliott has gone all her life thinking she was a lesbian and is, by all accounts, a “player”—in all heteronormative conceptions of the term, with a tomboyish demeanor to accompany the characterisation. In the same span of days, Elliott goes on a drug trip on her 18th birthday and meets her 39-year-old future self (a terrifically wisecracking Aubrey Plaza), who warns her to stay away from Chad for unexplained reasons. My Old Ass then turns into a bit of a magical realism romp as Elliott’s “old ass” returns to her life to give advice, even after she comes down from her high.
Stella, best known for her recurring role on the country music television series Nashville, plays Elliott as entertaining enough with the material she has to work with. Her scenes with Plaza are the most sentimental points in the film as Stella adeptly plays the “cool queer kid”, even if the archetype is skin-deep. Casting Plaza feels like Park’s singular spark of genius: a beloved bisexual icon who recently starred in Disney+’s Agatha All Along, playing a character discovering her more fluid sexuality. But in an extremely regretful twist, despite the film’s marketing, Plaza is only briefly in the film—a quick few scenes—and yet she still becomes the film’s saving grace.
Despite everything it tries to stand for, My Old Ass is filled to the brim with jigsawed-together faux-progressive tropes and buzzwords. This includes queer-coded characters played off purely for laughs, such as Elliott’s younger brother, Spencer (Carter Trozzolo), who wears a lace choker and is openly obsessed with Saoirse Ronan. The film naturally falls into bland clichés and broad strokes of the rom-com genre—a conventionally heteronormative film form—without ever interrogating how this script-flipping move impacts our protagonist and central couple. Elliott first encounters Chad while bathing nude in a river, a scene carved out purely for childish giggles. Their later meetups lack any and all charm, while Park trades character development for multiple cinematographically fluffy sequences of Elliott on the water in her boat.
On one hand, while characters including Spencer are used as gags, on the other hand, the base level of irony in the character of Chad is never utilised to its fullest extent, despite having chosen the most white-bread, frat boy name. He is, by no measure, a “chad” in Internet terms: skinny as a stick with a touch of wit that only just barely seems to charm Elliott, it’s hard to tell how we’re meant to root for the relationship between the two other than via our protagonist’s shocked admittance to her friends. Chad is more or less a shell filled in by a few background points, while Elliott is carried by her dismissive attitude that, at some point, grows aggravating.
The film further creeps into more confusing and concerning territory through the usage of bizarre rhetoric and diction choices, from Elliott’s exclamation of “Straight? That’s the fucking worst thing you’ve ever called me in my life!” to her utterance of “I’ve never had dick sex before…” to Chad. These choices of words feed into narratives of queer women simply not having “found the right man yet” or not having had penetrative sex with a cis man before, an issue that one might imagine should have been at the top of the list of impressions to avoid through this film.
Perhaps the most frustrating element is the lack of essentiality to the story: if Elliott were instead a teen boy, Park’s story would be a standard coming-out story of our protagonist discovering he is potentially bi- or pansexual—complete with the still surface-level romantic relationship. Very little about Elliott’s life and character necessitates this particular perspective. And so at best, My Old Ass engages in a superficial and frequently regurgitated conversation about how labels can or don’t have to be used on an individual basis. At worst, it’s a film that could easily be reread to service narratives of queer erasure rather than champion bisexuality, pansexuality, and sexual fluidity as it intends to.
‘My Old Ass’ is available to watch on Amazon Prime Video.
