My Old Ass is a Canadian coming-of-age story with subtlety and heart

If you could meet your future self, would you listen to what they had to say?

That's just one of the themes explored in the nuanced and funny new Canadian coming-of-age film, My Old Ass.

Now available to stream on Amazon Prime Video, the film stars Maisy Stella as Elliott, a girl who is in the midst of her last summer before university. Through a mushroom trip, Elliott meets an older version of herself, and what ensues following their meeting is both heartfelt and unexpected.

Today on Commotion, film critics Sarah-Tai Black and Roxana Hadadi review the time-travelling coming-of-age dramedy and how it manages to pack a surprising emotional punch.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Roxana, this is a story that is set at this really pivotal moment in Elliott's life. It is the summer before Elliott goes to university; she's going to the University of Toronto. How does this movie treat this sensitive age?

Roxana: It's such a golden time, right? And I think the movie really captures that sense of possibility, potential. Time is running out. You're really excited to get to the next phase. I think it captures all of that stuff really beautifully. I think it also captures that you can be a real jerk at this point in your life. You can be rude to your parents, and maybe not as nice as you could be to your friends. So I think all of the chaos of that time is handled really beautifully.

Elamin: I think "chaos" is putting it very lightly. I think most people go, "I think I was a bit of a nightmare during that period of time." Elliot takes some mushrooms, and ends up meeting her future self…. Sarah-Tai, what stands out for you about this first time that they're meeting each other?

Sarah-Tai: What comes to mind first is the fact that this is a time travel-space movement movie, but it doesn't have any of those sci-fi trappings. The premise is not even shaky. It's just a vehicle to let all the more figurative stuff shine through. There's a lot of barbs thrown here to people in our late 30s…. But I love the idea of meeting your future self and still not being that far removed from who you are as a person. You can see they still have the same kind of biting humor, even if the future is different than what the teenage self thought it would be. I thought it was really lovely, and if inner child work looked like this, I would do it more often.

Elamin: If Aubrey Plaza was involved in the creation of a conversation with your inner child—

Sarah-Tai: Yeah, if it was just fun hangs?

Elamin: I guess it turns out that is not necessarily the case.

Roxana, this is a movie that hits a lot of coming-of-age tropes. We're talking about the leaving of your hometown, or the questioning of your sexuality, or the trying of drugs. How do you find this movie plays with the tropes we're already familiar with?

Roxana: We've been talking a lot about the emotional subtlety. I also want to point out that it's very funny, and I think the way that it makes these tropes funny is, again, sort of unexpected to me. We open on this scene where Elliott and her friends are zooming across a lake and they're very bad drivers, and they keep bumping the boat into stuff. That is such a simple thing that I think immediately makes you know, the humour is going to be this sort of silly, goofy stuff, and that's going to complement everything else really well. I mean, I think a mushroom-induced freak out, again, is very familiar. But imagining your older self, it's not presented with any fanfare; suddenly Aubrey Plaza is just there.

Elamin: Just around, yeah.

Roxana: She's just hanging out. So I think there's a very downbeat quality to a lot of this trope experimentation that works.

Elamin: Sarah-Tai, if we can talk about the queerness of the movie for a moment, how did you feel about the queer coming of age story in My Old Ass?

Sarah-Tai: I love the idea of this queer coming-of-age, the summer before quote-unquote "adulthood" movie, where we're not getting this earthshaking queer realization. The first moment of the film is her trying to score with her lady crush at the lake cafe. It's just a really lovely tribute to what queer youth looks like. It's fun, and also very true to reality of the expectations you have for yourself as a queer teenager.

I had a very similar experience to Elliott where I was like, "I'm a lesbian." And then one day a Chad came along and I was like, "Wait a damn minute." It's a very unique experience to see onscreen. We're used to coming out stories, and those are important. But some people have it easier, and the becoming is something strange and different, and sometimes a little funny where you're like, turns out I'm 20 per cent straight, you know?... It feels very lived in. It feels very human, and it's lovely to watch, especially as an older queer person watching this. It gets tiring to watch the same kind of trauma-filled coming out narratives over and over again — that's not saying that's not the case for some folks, but for others, queer youth is a lot of the times full of joy, and confusion of a different sort.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden.