Starring: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks, Seth Isaac Johnson
Distributor: Warner Bros
Runtime: 89 mins. Reviewed in Oct 2024
Reviewer: Fr Peter Malone msc
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A mushroom trip brings free-spirited Elliott face-to-face with her 39-year-old self. But when Elliott’s ‘old ass’ delivers warnings to her younger self, Elliott realises she has to rethink everything about her family, life and love.
A wise piece of advice for reviewers is to hold on final opinion until the end credits. Some of the issues throughout the film may be a bit disturbing but it is the resolution that counts. Which is something of the case here.
This is a film that needs to be reviewed by someone involved in family and in education, the focus being on decisions young people make. Here, a somewhat free-spirited 18-year-old girl, Elliott (Stella, quite a strong screen presence) decides to study at university in Toronto. She can’t wait to leave her family home and the cranberry-producing farm.
It is the 2020s. Elliott and her best friends camp out for the night to experiment with shrooms and hallucinations. Her hard-working and devoted parents are unaware of this. She has a brother who is earnest and will inherit the farm. And there is a younger brother. So, on the surface, a somewhat ordinary contemporary family. However, Elliott is also assuming that she is gay, having had no attraction to any boyfriend.
The key to the story – and the moral of the story – is her hallucination high, an encounter with her 39-year-old self, played by Aubrey Plaza, discussions, later reappearances and phone calls (an atmosphere of magic realism as well as the magic mushrooms). The older advises the younger to beware of anyone called Chad. He soon appears and is a strong a sympathetic character to the family, not the kind of person that Elliott wants to avoid, no matter how hard her initial attempts.
Older teenagers watching this film could find it a catalyst for raising all kinds of personal questions, hopes and ambitions, identity, orientation, family relationships. Older reviewers are reassured with the older Elliott’s sound advice in removing the selfish blinders on younger Elliott concerning her family, their love, their work.
The film has received some enthusiastic reviews. It has obviously touched a nerve for viewers, especially for younger teenagers, younger women. These are the observations of an older, much older, male reviewer.
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