My Old Ass Parent Guide

For years, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her friends have been talking about getting out of their small town. Elliott’s family runs a cranberry farm, and she can’t imagine anything less interesting to do with her life than to wade around in a pond of cranberries year after year.

On Elliott’s 18^th birthday, she and her friends take some hallucinogenic mushrooms and go camping. For the other girls, it’s a strange but fun night of weird visuals and singing rabbits. For Elliott, it’s a meeting with herself, 21 years in the future. Thirty-nine-year-old Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) doesn’t want to say too much about the future, but it’s hard not to try to help yourself out. When she wakes up the next morning, Elliott thinks the meeting was a hallucination – until she finds her future self’s phone number saved in her contacts.

This is a surprisingly bittersweet movie, full of the perpetual confusion of an energetic 18-year-old and the stinging regrets of that same person pushing into middle age. I was expecting a raunchy comedy, but the film is a lot more than that. It leans into being a character study, showcasing Elliott’s struggles and growth. The movie is about her and knows it, keeping the background characters to the background and letting her figure herself out.

Of course, candid looks at the lives of most eighteen-year-olds are going to have some content issues. The shrooms are an obvious sticking point, but there are also a few frisky makeout scenes and a heavy helping of profanity. The script also got some of the best Gen-Z dialogue I’ve heard in a while, and it manages to avoid the usual patronizing tone that comes when young characters’ lines are penned by older people. This skillful dialogue is particularly critical to this film: Elliott is a complex, interesting, sometimes maddening character, and it takes good writing to make sure the audience finds her sympathetic.

Getting old does, in fact, suck quite a bit, in a lot of different ways. And while the movie is not shy about pointing out that the future is likely to be unpleasant, it’s equally forthcoming with the idea that life can be good in spite of it. You’re unlikely to get what you want, and if you do, it’s unlikely to be what you thought it was, and if it is, it’s probably bad for you – but you’ll find other things that you never would have imagined would have appealed to you. If you can handle the 100+ curse words, you’ll see why this is one of the more compelling films I’ve seen this year.