One Girl’s Hallucinogens Summon Aubrey Plaza From the Future
At a certain age, we start to wonder what it would be like to revisit our younger selves, with the foreknowledge we now have as adults: What advice would we give them? What decisions would we tell them to make differently? What regrets do we have, looking back at ourselves from decades past, and how would we fix them, if we could?
It’s the sort of conundrum that time-travel stories love examining, and their portrayals of the nature of time, either mutable from the past or fixed by the present, always influence the story’s ultimate lesson. My Old Ass, the new feature from director Megan Park (The Fallout) now in wide release, offers a spin on this kind of time-travel tale, focusing less on the endless battle between free will and the continuum, and more on why we choose paths that might be difficult or self-destructive in the first place.
It’s late summer, and Elliott Labrant (Nashville's Maisy Stella, dressed in an endless array of comfy flannels) is staring down the barrel of her last few weeks working on her parents’ Ontario cranberry farm before she heads off to college. During an overnight camping trip to their favorite island, Elliott and her two best friends take hallucinogens for the first time, hoping for visions of world peace and/or conversations with trees. What Elliott doesn’t expect is to summon her own self from 20 years into the future (Aubrey Plaza, acidic as always), who reluctantly offers some advice, and a warning.