A queer gem from the ‘Barbie’ brain trust featuring an against-type Aubrey Plaza comes of age on streaming

Those of you who don’t peek your heads too deeply into the film world may not have a Pavlovian response to the word “LuckyChap,” but those who do know that they can expect great things whenever those big pink letters rear their head before a film begins to play.

Indeed, LuckyChap Entertainment — the production company co-founded by one Margot Robbie — has quite loudly been beefing up the cinema zeitgeist for some time now. Most recently, we have it to thank in part for the joyous juggernaut that is Barbie, as well as Saltburn, the best movie featuring a scene where Barry Keoghan licks semen out of a bathtub drain ever made. LuckyChap’s latest hit, however, is My Old Ass, and the Prime Video denizens are eating it up right now.

Per FlixPatrol, My Old Ass has debuted at the top of the Prime Video charts in the United States at the time of writing, beating out the likes of sci-fi stinker Infinite, middling zombie fare Apocalypse Z: The Beginning of the End, and unadventurous action thriller Canary Black. There’s poetry inherent in a quaint little coming-of-age film standing tall against more ambitious and poorly-executed thrills.

My Old Ass introduces Maisy Stella as Elliott, a recent high school grad who’s stoked to move away from her life on her family’s farm and into the big city of Toronto. When she does mushrooms in the woods with her friends to celebrate, she manifests a woman in her late 30s (Aubrey Plaza) who turns out to be Elliott from the future. Not one to miss out on the opportunity presented here, Elliott seeks out wisdom from her older self and endeavors to lap up as much as her older self is willing to give. Her most important piece of advice? Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, get involved with a boy named Chad. Then, Elliott meets a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White).

The greatest strength of My Old Ass is the subversive skeleton of its queer storytelling. Elliott is a lesbian, but she isn’t initially written as a queer character on account of her relationship to love and attraction being fairly narrow and conventional. In this way, Elliott’s most interesting arc comes in the form of learning how to be comfortable in her queerness, which is different from solely being comfortable with one’s sexuality.

Unfortunately, this aspect of the film is undercut by its misguided attempts at building drama with its core tension (namely, the mystery of why Older Elliott is so adamant that Elliott avoid Chad). The film treats the eventual revelation as a big reveal, but, while the textual reason for Older Elliott’s adamance may catch viewers off-guard, it’s not actually the revelation itself that we’re responding to, but the emotional fallout of it. Then the revelation finally comes and there’s not enough runtime left to dig into the nuances of that emotional fallout in as meaningful a way as it deserves.

A better version of My Old Ass would have built itself around Elliott wrestling with that emotional fallout rather than the pseudo-mystery of why Chad is not to be engaged with, especially considering how much more it would have elevated Elliott’s arc and the film’s themes as a whole. Regardless, Ass is doing anything but sitting on its own, and you should certainly plop down on yours now that this flick is the #1 distraction you need this weekend.