‘My Old Ass’ is an offbeat and disarmingly charming coming of age comedy in which, while high on mushrooms, teenager Elliott (Maisy Stella) meets her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza) who imparts life lessons and gives her some very specific instructions from the point of view of the future. While this premise might sound like a cross between ‘The Terminator’ and ‘Back to the Future’, it is a deliberately low-key, indie drama which plays with ideas and verbalizes their consequences, rather than try to follow through on the genre possibilities, with their characteristically dystopian narratives, that we have come to expect from apocalyptic and disaster movies of the 80s and 90s.

‘My Old Ass’ does not try to be anything more than a rumination on the goals we set ourselves and the way we inure ourselves from the possibility of hardship by protecting ourselves from the risk of something going awry. But, here, Elliott is made aware by her older self that she must avoid someone called Chad, without the reason being spelled out. Then, when Chad – a perfect-in-every-way boyfriend-to-be – appears on the scene, Elliott at first tries to do everything she can to avoid him, without really knowing why, and this is where the machinations of fate take their toll, and Elliott ends up falling into the very pathway that she was seeking to prevent. This is highly relatable as we have all found ourselves in situations whereby something we know isn’t good for us becomes a driver and a gateway to a life lesson we end up appreciating.

Here, though, Elliott cannot think of a single reason why she shouldn’t be with Chad (Percy Hynes White), and when she does discover the reason it is something so far out of her ability to influence events that she realizes, as does her older self, that living in and for the moment can have intrinsic value and that trying to cheat fate may actually result in a worse destiny down the line. The film is clever in this respect of having the younger, teenage self being a teacher to her older self, with her own keenness, in the fulness of youth, to chart her own destiny, something which the older Elliott, despite knowing the hardships that are in store, appreciates as a necessary step towards adulthood and wisdom.

The adage that applies here is that it is better to love and suffer than not love at all, and ‘My Old Ass’ is good at pinpointing the ways in which experience trumps knowledge. This is more ‘The Notebook’ or ‘The Lake House’ than ‘Looper’ in that it is the way time might be subservient to our romantic dispositions that gives it its edge over the ability to cheat time, in a ‘Final Destination’-type scenario and bring about a different future. Elliott is happily resigned to chance, and in a telling scene even when she finds out from her older self what, or rather who, she is supposed to avoid this actually demarcates and ringfences the preciousness of the moment, lending ‘My Old Ass’ an enrichingly existentialist proclivity.