There are shades of Petite Maman and All of Us Strangers in the slickly packaged, Margot Robbie-produced Sundance comedy My Old Ass, taking a similarly magical high-concept “what if?” but with a far frothier touch. Premiering at a coveted big Saturday night slot, it arrives during a festival that has buyers on high alert, schedules lightened by last year’s strikes pausing production. While the old-fashioned Sundance crowd-pleaser might have become less commercially viable in recent years thanks to both audience and industry shifts (films like Blinded by the Light, Late Night, Brittany Runs a Marathon and Flora and Son going from big sales to little audiences), it still feels like an easy win, easily winning over a packed-out cinema of festival-goers.
Set in those emotionally complicated few weeks before the first year of college, My Old Ass centres on Elliott (Maisy Stella), a queer teen living in the idyll of the Muskoka Lakes in Canada (the film doubles up as a persuasive tourism ad). Choosing to spend her remaining days hooking up with a local girl and getting high, she leaves her family to anxiously await her departure alone, believably selfish rather than monstrous teen behaviour. When Elliott takes some mushrooms with her two closest friends, she’s met with her older self (Aubrey Plaza), a head-scratcher that she chalks up to the trip rather than a crack in the the fabric of the universe. But when she returns to the sober light of day, she finds that her future self has left her number in her phone and the two engage in a phone relationship, the older Elliott trying to impart wisdom.
