People imagined all sorts of global nightmare scenarios were coming in the months building up to January 1st, 2000, but none of them were quite as absurd as the premise of Y2K from director Kyle Mooney, A24’s new disaster comedy.
Set on New Year’s Eve in 1999, Y2K tells the story of how a group of teens set out to celebrate the new millennium by throwing (or at least attending) the party of a lifetime. Though everyone’s heard of the Y2K bug, all Eli (Jaeden Martell), Danny (Julian Dennison), and Laura (Rachel Zegler) can really think about is how they might bump into one another at the rager and how the night could change their lives forever. When the power goes out at the stroke of midnight, the kids are quick to laugh things off and assume that maybe someone’s just playing a prank. But they have no idea what to do when a couple of appliances seemingly come to life and promptly start trying to murder them.
Weirdly, a lot of the madness on display in Y2K’s trailer is reminiscent of the real panic that drove people to buy up toilet paper and water in bulk fearing that a programming error would topple our technological infrastructure. But the film seems like it’s going to lean so far into the absurdity and silliness that it might be a bit of a grating watch when it hits theaters on December 6th.
