
Starring: Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler
Director: Megan Park
Country: Canada
UK Release: Amazon Prime
Celebrating her eighteenth birthday, Elliott (Stella – Nashville) takes magic mushrooms with her friends and during the resulting trip, she encounters the older version of herself (Plaza – Parks And Rercreation, Emily The Killer). Elliott is a lesbian, so when her older self warns her to stay away from a boy called Chad (Hynes White – Wednesday), she is confused to eventually meet – and find herself attracted to – a kind and friendly young man working on her father’s farm. Finding herself confusingly falling in love with him, she desperately tries to contact her future self to understand this confusing advice.
A sci-fi coming-of-age drama with a simple and crystal clear concept, there was plenty of dramatic potential in this time travel romance… but yet no avenues are explored beyond its singular storyline. Aside from one scene in which we learn that the “future” involves air raid shelters, Elliott seems completely uninterested in what the future holds beyond her feelings for Chad and the family farm. As a result, the whole film feels somewhat short-sighted.
We are also asked to suspend our disbelief that Maisy Stella – fizzing with cheerful optimism – and Aubrey Plaza – deadpan, jaded and sarcastic – are somehow the same character twenty years apart. They don’t look like each other, they don’t behave like each other… in fact you begin to wonder whether they really are the same character after all.
As teen romantic comedies go, this is pretty non-offensive stuff, but with Plaza involved this could have been an edgy, smart and witty film. The reality is that instead it’s just…. fine. Its performances are adequate, the narrative is evenly-paced, while the script is light and sometimes funny. Its concept ticks away quietly in the background, almost secondary to the romance at the centre, but as light teen sci-fi goes, Freaky Friday it is not.
UK Release: Out now to stream on Amazon Prime
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