I notoriously hate horror movies. I am the buzzkill who will tell her friends to never, ever, put one on.
I blindly walked into Doc Film’s early screening of Y2K knowing one thing: Kyle Mooney was its director, and therefore, it was going to be funny.
And it was funny. The film introduces us to best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison), two high schoolers in 1999. This year, they decide, they’re going to do something wild. They sneak alcohol, crash a party, and (attempt to) flirt with girls. Their teenage awkwardness and relatability initially introduce this film as a funny and relatable coming-of-age film.
Until, seconds after ringing in Y2K, a fan is lodged in somebody’s head, a toy car burns off a face, and a Tamagotchi murders another. You can imagine my expression when I realized that I was now also strapped in for a horror movie.
What ensued in the next 80 minutes or so was a horror-comedy that asks: what if Y2K had actually happened, and technology took over the world? We follow Eli and his friends as they escape from killer robots and seek to save themselves and the rest of humanity. With all its gore and bloodiness, Y2K takes us on an hour-and-a-half adventure where relationships are built, adversities are overcome, and teenagers grow into their own in the face of an unfathomable disaster. It was thrilling, scary (but maybe that was just me), funny, and heartwarming. With sentient robots as the film’s antagonist, Y2K plays on a fear that feels eerily real. But that fear allows the film to ask: what does it mean to be human, and to come together in our humanness?
“It’s interesting because there was a lot of fear and hysteria about what Y2K would bring,” director Kyle Mooney said in a college roundtable with the Chicago Maroon. He connected the fear at the turn of the century to our modern fear of technology in 2024. “Today, I feel like we’re so consumed by our phones, and I think the internet is a very scary place, and social media can be pretty intimidating and frightening as well […] Now, it feels like that has become very threatening and something we need to be conscious of, and how it affects our lives.”
From its ’90s pop culture references, slang, and fashion, Y2K also works to transport audiences into 1999. Notably, CJ (Daniel Zolghadri)—one of the quirky teenagers we are introduced to in this film—is deep in the underground hip-hop scene. According to Mooney, the character’s love for the genre was inspired by his high-school self. “Maybe starting my sophomore year of high school, I got really into underground hip-hop, and I was in a group with two of my friends. We were called Instruments of Intelligence,” he grinned. “Our whole thing was like, just bragging about how we weren’t mainstream. And it was very cringy and corny, and I made beats… and I collected records and sampled stuff. I would like to think I was a little more self-aware than CJ, but I probably was not. So it’s not something I necessarily say proudly, but I definitely relate a lot to him, and a lot of what he’s saying and doing are things that I would have said and done.”
Mooney also spoke on the film’s protagonist, Eli. “With Eli—-I don’t know that I was ever, especially in early high school, incredibly confident in socializing… arguably, I’m still not incredibly confident at it. So I think I definitely can relate to him and that difficulty and challenge of fitting in and sort of figuring out who you are […] which I imagine is pretty universal, but I definitely felt that.”
Most coming-of-age comedies try to say: be yourself. But as a film that also categorizes itself in the horror/disaster genre, it also seems to tell us to come together in our collective humanity. “It’s so easy to forget that all of us are human,” Mooney said. “There is so much anger out there and hate, and I get caught up in it […] But it’s something that I think, any age you are, you’ve got to work on and you’ve got to be conscious of.”
“It’s been really special meeting people, especially young people like yourselves, who were not there [in 2000],” Mooney responded when asked about what sharing this film with a younger, college-aged audience has meant to him. “And if you can relate to it, and if there’s any universality to it, that means a ton.”
Y2K premiered on December 6 and is now playing in theaters nationwide.
