At a time when everyone seems obsessed with the 2000s, Y2K delivers on the nostalgia for the period, but not much else. Head of Reviews Robert Flynn gets into Kyle Mooney’s directorial debut and why the film ultimately falls flat
Throughout the 2010s, Saturday Night Live (SNL) had a famously tumultuous period while the show waded through multiple identities, struggling to find a core cast that felt sturdy and consistent. Among the myriad of sketches that experimented broadly with different rhythms and comedic tones there were a series of odd and weirdly specific sketches from cast members and writers Kyle Mooney and Beck Bennett. Each sketch felt just as inspired as the other and conveyed the same balance of sentimentality and absurdity.
Mooney was the main auteur of these sketches, always finding avenues to balance a sitcom-y, saccharine sentimentality with off-kilter non sequiturs and absurd aberrations from the general tone of the sketch. Despite their success on the show, it was always going to be a difficult balancing act for Mooney to translate his comedic sensibilities into different mediums once he left the sketch show in 2022.
In the cult comedy world, Mooney has become nothing short of an icon with his strange forays into Film and TV, Brigsby Bear (2017) and his short-lived Netflix series Saturday Morning All Star Hits!, but his directorial debut Y2K (2025) shows the comedian attempting to convey his sensibilities through a major studio comedy. As per usual, Mooney doesn't let this opportunity pass him by, producing an extremely unique, yet surprisingly middling, horror-comedy.
Set at the turn of the millennium, Y2K plays on the fads, tropes, and technological-focused anxieties of the time. While AOL chat rooms pop up and an excessive amount of Limp Bizkit blares, painfully quaint Eli (Jaeden Martell) longs for the attention of Laura (Rachel Zegler), the popular tech-wiz of Eli’s dreams. In typical high-school-set comedy fashion, Eli and his much more outgoing and crude best friend Danny (Julian Dennison), are given the opportunity to enter the popular bubble when they catch wind of a New Years Eve Party going down. After getting uncharacteristically soused, the pair storm the party. However, just as the clock strikes midnight, and just as Eli begins to talk to Laura, the most insane and gory version of everyone’s Y2K anxieties are realised before their eyes.
The first act of Y2K’s relatively tight three act structure is played completely straight, leaning into the iconography of the era. It can feel particularly disconcerting once the film commits to transitioning into a fully-fledged apocalyptic, Invasion of the Body Snatchers-esque film. This grants Mooney an opportunity to demonstrate his creativity, crafting visually interesting amalgamations of typical household appliances that enact vivid and hilarious acts of violence on much of the supporting cast, but that can only achieve so much for his film. Despite some intriguing directorial flairs, the consecutive acts fail to muster up the same kind of excitement.
The main issue with Mooney’s ambitious film comes down to him trying to dismantle a long-stated comedy rule: never place a hat atop another hat. The smorgasbord of genres that Mooney wishes to play in (high school comedy films, apocalyptic invasion horror films, hangout-stoner films) feel completely out of sync with one another. The iconic Kyle Mooney self-awareness and genre parody is lost in the sea of ideas that he has dove into head first.
That is not to say that Y2K completely short-circuits. Zegler and Dennison often feel as though they are on the same wavelength of the odd structure and scattered tone of the film, giving performances that manage to land some comedic jabs and centre the film despite its many twists and turns. Mooney can’t help but bring humor to the screen either, with a much needed supporting cameo from Mooney himself as well as a particularly charming appearance from Limp Bizkit leader Fred Durst (in a role where he delightfully plays himself).
As a die-hard Mooney fan it can feel disheartening that the oddball comedian failed to convey his undeniable talents at such a high level. There are flashes of the same magic that Mooney was able to muster during his SNL days but in Y2K they feel largely scattered and few and far between. Perhaps, for now, Mooney shall remain comedy’s best kept secret.