My Old Ass: even Aubrey Plaza can’t save this grating time-travelling comedy

The Parks and Recreation star is the best thing about this wan, saggy film – and she doesn’t get nearly enough screen time

2/5
From whatever angle you approach it, My Old Ass has had quite the year. When it was unveiled at Sundance in January, My Old Ass drew sustained applause from almost all who saw it. Indeed, some posted on social media that its twists and turns had moved them to tears. 
Sadly, though, the purple patch couldn’t last, and it must be admitted that My Old Ass looks significantly less appetising in the cold late September light of its UK release. In fact, if we’re being honest, it’s a bit wan and saggy. And while there’s still (arguably) some fun to be had with this independent comedy’s double-entendre-friendly title, the laughs – such as they are – don’t extend a great deal further than that. 
Its premise is certainly cute: perhaps a little too much so for its own good. Maisy Stella, best known for her work in the television series Nashville, plays Elliott, a free-spirited teen from rural Ontario, who drinks hallucinogenic mushroom tea one night while camping with friends. It takes a while to kick in, but the wait is worth it, because that evening she finds herself deep in conversation by the campfire with her 39-year-old future self. 
Older Elliott is played by The White Lotus’s Aubrey Plaza – and while the resemblance between the two actresses isn’t what you’d call striking, that they’re obviously different people isn’t not the idea here. Where the teen is impulsive and passionate, the woman is calmer and more self-assured, with a healthy sardonic edge. 
She comes bearing a single piece of life advice for her former self, too: whatever happens, do not fall for a pleasant-seeming local lad called Chad (played by Wednesday’s Percy Hynes White). Though confused by the tip – not least because she’s into girls, not boys – younger Elliott says she’ll bear it in mind.
With the setup complete, Plaza’s screen time is, unfortunately, half-over. And without her leavening presence – a handful of mobile exchanges notwithstanding, after she saves her contact details in her younger self’s phone under MY OLD ASS, all caps – the film becomes significantly harder to take. 
Thanks to a suite of grating writing and performance choices, the younger Elliott makes for a smug and supercilious heroine. And aside from the seemingly unavoidable blossoming of a relationship with the one guy her future self ordered her to avoid, little of what she gets up to lands with much dramatic weight. 
On her older ass’s instruction, Elliott makes a renewed effort to spend time with her parents and brothers before college takes her away from the family home. But so what? They’re all pleasant people – arguably boringly so – though her youngest sibling’s obsession with the actress Saoirse Ronan, played for laughs, may be the most Sundance-y running joke ever conceived.
Your reward for weathering all this is Plaza’s second and final big scene, which the Parks and Recreation star plays so skilfully, the mystery of the forbidden Chad courtship is tied up with a swell of emotion it otherwise hasn’t worked that hard to earn. Worth watching for? On balance, no. But at least the note it ends on isn’t a bum one.
In cinemas from Sept 27