Kyle Mooney Takes His ’90s Obsession to the Big Screen to Celebrate Y2K

If obsession is at the heart of many great filmmakers, maybe doing Saturday Night Live sketches is a better training ground for the cinema than we’ve long assumed. The conventional wisdom has held that for every star on the level of Eddie Murphy or Bill Murray, there are plenty of alumni whose starring vehicles feel like sketches strung out on a loop. Yet the increased segmentation of the show over the years has allowed for emergence of SNL players with hyperfocused, hyperspecific areas of expertise, like Andy Samberg and the Lonely Island’s ongoing study of pop music, or Sarah Sherman and her infatuation with body horror. Before, during, and after his nine-year run on the show, Kyle Mooney has specialized in observing and dissecting turn-of-the-’90s junk culture, from crummy family sitcoms to hacky stand-up comics to Saturday morning TV blocks, locating an awkward melancholy beneath their banal exterior. For his feature directorial debut, Mooney jumps ahead, but not too far: Y2K starts out on December 31, 1999, during the transition from one millennium to another and, perhaps more importantly to Mooney’s interests, from “Tubthumping” to “The Thong Song.”

Technically, “Tubthumping” peaked in 1997, and “The Thong Song,” though appearing on an album that released in late ’99, wasn’t a big single until 2000. Are these subjects for nitpicking, or has Mooney selected tracks that will, to a micro-generation, exemplify the difference between high school nostalgia for alt-rock in its novelty phase and college nostalgia for the growing dominance of hip-hop-influenced pop? Based on his eye for detail throughout Y2K, I’m inclined to assume it’s the latter. As nerdy junior-year besties Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) go about their day leading to a big New Year’s celebration they weren’t actually invited to attend, viewers of a certain age will be hit with blast after blast of extremely-late-’90s recognition. It’s all here: plugging a portable CD player into a car stereo via one of those tape-deck connectors; modem noises; video stores with ample VHS stock; getting hit with an away-message mid-conversation with your crush.

For Eli, that crush is Laura (Rachel Zegler), a popular classmate with a sideline in computer hacking – your perfect turn-of-the-century dreamgirl. Naturally, her skills come in handy later, when the clock strikes 12, the Y2K bug activates, and every machine in sight turns against humans in a bloody uprising. Oh, right: Y2K is a horror comedy. It’s easy enough to forget this for its charming opening 30 minutes, which sets up something more akin to a New Year’s gloss on Superbad before turning into more of a sped-up slasher film. As self-created robo-monsters stalk everyone in town, Eli, Danny, Laura, and other mismatched members of cliques like hardcore Limp Bizkit fan Ash (Lachlan Watson) and CJ (Daniel Zolghadri), a self-serious and self-styled MC (who hates Bizkit), run for their lives.

Mooney, who also co-wrote the film with Evan Winter and appears in a trademark Cali-burnout role, doesn’t skimp on the gory deaths, maybe wary of becoming one of those horror comedies that’s mostly bloodless shtick. In doing so, he creates a mordantly funny alternate history where, rather than slowly deteriorating society over the course of several decades, technological innovations decide to simply get it all over with in one night. There’s probably even greater satirical potential here than Mooney and Winter ultimately decide to mine – and, for that matter, the gags and funny lines in the back half of Y2K don’t come quite as frequently or powerfully as they do in the first 40 minutes or so (though there is a funny detour to a makeshift commune that springs up on the outskirts of town almost immediately). Multiple clever ideas are raised, then largely abandoned – or in another case, shown undue loyalty. There’s a major cameo that starts off as a coup and turns into enough screen time to qualify as a genuine supporting role.

But that’s also how and why Mooney’s film remains so endearing, even as it lacks the oddball emo-whimsy of Brigsby Bear, the feature he starred in and co-wrote in 2017. As ruthless as some of the deaths can be, and tongue-in-cheek as the movie’s heightened reality becomes, Y2K remains affectionate toward its characters; it has a surprising amount of warmth and sweetness for what’s essentially a comedy about teens trying to get laid that pivots to a comedy about teens getting hacked to death by robots. Martell may have been typecast as the sensitive little guy in all manner of horror-related coming-of-age pictures, but he channels some of Mooney’s own effortless awkwardness as Eli; Dennison puts his stamp on the Superbad role played by Jonah Hill (who is among the producers here); and Zegler does her charming best to humanize a character that could easily become a young male fantasy.

It also helps that the movie is shot by frequent Edgar Wright cinematographer Bill Pope, a veteran at delivering comedy-genre hybrids with genuine style – even if this particular production occasionally sacrifices dramatic lighting to digital demands. For another form of verisimilitude, though, this should really be shot like a McG video. Even moreso than Mooney’s Dumpster-diving in his shorter-form projects, Y2K becomes a willfully silly act of reclamation – a narrative version of how a terrible radio song from our youth can offer a peculiar comfort when tinnily piped into a grocery store PA years later. Someday it might be neat to see what, if anything, Mooney has to say about actual, genuine adulthood. For now, though, he’s approaching his favorite subject with just the right mix of preserving nostalgia and breaking stuff.

Director: Kyle Mooney
Writers: Kyle Mooney and Evan Winter
Starring: Jaeden Martell, Rachel Zegler, Julian Dennison, Kyle Mooney, Lachlan Watson
Release date: December 6, 2024

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where offerings include an informal podcast. He also co-hosts the New Flesh, a podcast about horror movies, and wastes time on Twitter under the handle @rockmarooned.