Horror-comedy Y2K merely collects references on tech doomsday
Kyle Mooney makes his directorial debut by diving headfirst into the nostalgia shallow end.
Photo: A24
Two years after being released from the 30 Rockefeller basement, and nearly eight years since co-writing his first feature, Kyle Mooney has made his long-awaited directorial debut with Y2K. Mooney’s hilarious comedic sensibility, first demonstrated at the Good Neighbor YouTube channel where he made skits with fellow SNL player Beck Bennett and comedy writer Nick Rutherford, was frequently victim to being underutilized during his near-decade tenure at Saturday Night Live. The warm reception for Brigsby Bear back in 2017—which Mooney also starred in—seemed to indicate that the comedian might find more artistic success once he finally left SNL. Perhaps he’d follow in the footsteps of fellow cast member Tim Robinson, another talent whose skills (and particular sense of humor) seemed at odds with the NBC comedy institution.
Similar to Conner O’Malley, Mooney has also had a comedic fascination with aughtie burnout suburbanites, overgrown children who could never escape the purgatory of their hometown after high school. One of Mooney’s Good Neighbor characters, Chris Fitzpatrick, was a backward-capped 4/20 enthusiast with a roll of condoms in his shirt pocket, who still lived with his mom and strutted around grade-schoolers to seem cool. He probably listens to Creed. It makes sense that for Mooney’s directorial debut, he’d center the narrative around that same time period—although not on that type of character. Instead, Mooney goes for a total Y2K pop culture nostalgia trip; a horror-comedy that imagines a world in which the techno-pocalypse of the year 2000 actually came to fruition. It releases into a world already fixated on 2000s nostalgia; Tamagotchi and N64s swirl through the public consciousness in a rosy haze of reminiscence—why not capitalize on that?
Led by a who’s who of young actors (one wonders how many of them knew who Fred Durst was before filming with him), Y2K centers around shy teen Eli (Jaeden Martell) and his boisterous yet equally outcast friend Danny (Julian Dennison). Going for something of a tepid Jonah Hill/Michael Cera dynamic, Eli and Danny attempt to break out of their status as losers by going to a Cool Kid party, where Eli might get a chance with his AIM chat pal and dream girl, Laura (Rachel Zegler). Though both bullied relentlessly by the baggy-pantsed, Limp Bizkit-loving burnout kids—whom Mooney very obviously has the most affection for—Danny ends up making his mark on the party by slipping Eli’s mixtape into the CD player and rapping along enthusiastically. But Danny leaves Eli in the lurch, too eager to misuse his longtime chum by relaying an embarrassing story at Eli’s expense to the popular kids swarming him. On top of whiffing with Laura and being subsequently threatened by the guy he thought was her now-ex-boyfriend, it’s almost a godsend for Eli when all the tech and machinery in the party house starts turning the teenagers into rump roast.
Y2K’s kills are occasionally shocking. A dick gets mangled by a rogue blender. Arms and heads get lopped off. CD-ROMs are flung like throwing stars. Yet what’s more shocking is that Mooney and co-writer Evan Winter decide to kill off major characters quite mercilessly, barely 30 minutes into the film. (One of the deaths, involving a skateboard, is a decidedly funny moment.) It’s bold, but these character absences leave an awkward, deflating dynamic between the remaining survivors, which include lower-tier stoner squad members CJ (Daniel Zolghadri) and Ash (Lachlan Watson).