If you could ask your future self anything, what would it be? This very simple question is regularly asked as a hypothetical in various thought experiments or casual discussions and usually yields results ranging from outrageously funny to deeply thought-provoking, especially since it reflects our inner existential quandaries. It also proves to be the fundamental premise of My Old Ass, the second directorial outing from filmmaker Megan Park, who tells the story of Elliott, who has recently turned eighteen and is looking forward to the future, which entails leaving her family’s cranberry farm to go to University in Toronto, where she plans to experience life, particularly exploring her identity and coming to understand what it means to be an adult. However, after an ill-advised hallucinogenic trip, she comes into contact with an older version of herself, who appears in vivid detail and attempts to warn her younger self about potential challenges she is set to face, including advising her to exercise caution around a possible relationship, leading to Elliott having a minor existential crisis that is only worsened when she finds that the person she is told to avoid proves to be entirely irresistible. A film that has a good concept but tends to be quite limited in its perspective, My Old Ass is nonetheless a very entertaining romp through the daily life of someone venturing into the unknown wilderness of early adulthood, encountering inevitable challenges, and attempting to find herself amid the chaos and confusion that everyone comes across at some point of their life. Park is a fascinating voice, and while it is a massive deviation in both tone and substance from her previous work, the celebrated The Fallout, it still proves that she is developing into a strong filmmaker with a unique approach and a growing command of her craft. Deeply flawed but still compelling in its way, the film offers something special, even if the final product is somewhat lacking.

Coming-of-age narratives are essentially a dime a dozen, and as far as this film goes in terms of exploring the fundamental themes usually associated with these stories, it is quite straightforward and conventional. My Old Ass is simply the story of a young woman caught in that ambigious space between adolescence and adulthood, scrambling to find a way forward towards a future she knows will be exciting, but which still will contain many obstacles. It’s a fairly traditional story at its core, and Park has been driven to make something that is more authentic than it is ambitious. However, this doesn’t mean that it lacks elements that do set it apart, as evident from the addition of a particular quirk, the aforementioned use of the protagonist’s older self visiting her and becoming her closest advisor, attempting to guide her through these treacherous years of early adulthood, albeit apprehensively as a means to avoid any potential shifts in the fabric of time (although it is clear that the director is not particularly interested in developing the more logical side of the story, and that her sensibilities do not lend themselves to science fiction all that well), solely to prevent the heartbreak she knows her younger self is about to experience. This bolsters the conventional aspects of the story, which is relatively by the numbers as far as coming-of-age stories are concerned. The addition of other themes, particularly those of the protagonist’s sexuality and how she negotiates her identity while anxiously waiting for her life to begin, shows a lot of nuances, even if some of the commentaries are somewhat troublesome, mainly in how Park assimilates queer issues into the story, which is clunky at the best of times and feels somewhat awkward (an unfortunate result of a queer story being crafted by a filmmaker outside of the community she is trying to represent), but still manages to sustain our interest based solely on the fact that it has good intentions and its approach to looking at the fluidity of sexuality being somewhat progressive, although not nearly as much as some other recent works based on the same subject.

At a cursory glance, we are led to believe that My Old Ass is a two-hander between newcomer Maisy Stella and Aubrey Plaza, playing the character of Elliott at two different points in her life. However, despite this clear attempt to draw in an audience that is enamoured with Plaza’s gradual ascent to become one of the most intriguing actors working today, the film does prove to be a good showcase for Stella, who is a revelation in the central role. This kind of naturalistic, authentic style of performance is very rare, and while there are a couple of moments where her relative inexperience does show slightly, for the most part, she is wonderful, bringing a difficult character to life with vigour and honesty, binding the film together as its primary focus and establishing herself as an actor to watch in the future. Plaza, despite being used as a marketing tool to promote the film, has very little time on screen, appearing in total for only about ten minutes spread over two scenes, which may be the centrepieces of their respective acts, but don’t feel like they’re contributing much outside of exposition. Plaza is certainly willing to commit to every aspect of the character, despite being somewhat miscast (the two leads do not bear even a passing resemblance, making the fact that they’re playing the same character highly implausible), and being given very little to do. However, as is the case with any great actor being given a thankless role, Plaza does her absolute best but there’s only a finite amount of effort she can put into what is essentially just a physical embodiment of exposition. It’s unfortunate to see great actors reduced to such thankless roles, but to still deliver something memorable is a great achievement on its own, and allows us to see a very different side to an actor who is usually cast in the same kinds of roles, and is allowed to here step out of her comfort zone and do something slightly different.

As charming as it may be, especially when it comes to its characters, My Old Ass still has several clear shortcomings that stand in its way of being truly exceptional or reaching its full potential. Park is still developing her voice as a director, so she warrants some leniency considering this is only her second directorial outing (and by far the one with the widest reach, as her previous work was on television) but still needs to be appropriately critiqued for how she chooses to tell this story. Primarily, the film doesn’t know quite what it wants to be – the first act is almost entirely a comedy, filled with irreverent humour and a twisted concept that implies it is going to be an outrageous experience. However, when the gimmick disappears from the story, it starts to feel like much more of a straightforward romantic drama, which is contradictory to every piece of marketing and the overall premise and erodes much of our interest in the narrative, which is not particularly special. In this capacity, the film does lose some of its lustre, especially since it doesn’t quite know how to control its underlying emotions, which oscillate between genuinely funny and heartfelt in some moments, to intensely melodramatic and cliched in others. The best qualities of this story are overlooked in favour of a rather milquetoast tale of a teenager realizing that she is questioning her identity, slowly falling in love with a boy after spending most of her adolescence believing she was a lesbian – there are deeper implications that border on regressive on this particular point, but that’s an entirely different discussion and one that can be summarized by the overall criticism we have for this film, which is that its simply half-baked and lacklustre when it could have been a generation-defining work. It introduces conversations on identity, the process of maturing and the importance of family, but it doesn’t follow through on any of them in a significant way, instead choosing to be quite shallow and one-dimensional in its emotional inventory, often coming across as quite heavy-handed and dull when it should have soared in triumph.

Convention is the concept du jour when it comes to this film, which is a solid but unremarkable comedy that has its moments of ingenuity but is mainly very traditional, right down to following the same predictable pattern we’ve come to associate with the genre and its many common traits. It’s not particularly daring, and outside of a good concept that is woefully under-utilized, My Old Ass proves to be an amusing but uneventful attempt at the coming-of-age comedy genre. Had Park chosen to make the film more focused on the relationship between the protagonist and her older self, it would have yielded more exciting results, and been able to avoid the same trite conventions that ultimately weigh the film down and prevent it from being anything we haven’t encountered many times before. The performances from the leads are solid, and the writing is sharp and sincere, but it never truly amounts to anything particularly worthwhile, outside of the novelty of seeing a strong first act devolve into something that is only mildly engaging, which isn’t helped by the fact that it is not funny enough to be considered a successful comedy, nor dramatic enough to have much emotional bandwidth, instead existing right at the centre of the two, and proving to be nothing particularly noteworthy, and eventually devolving into something that doesn’t quite bear much significance and does what it intends to do, and not much else.