Miller’s Girl (2024) Review!!

Synopsis – A talented young writer (Jenna Ortega) embarks on a creative odyssey when her teacher (Martin Freeman) assigns a project that entangles them both in an increasingly complex web. As lines blur and their lives intertwine, professor and protégé must confront their darkest selves while straining to preserve their individual sense of purpose and the things they hold most dear.

My Take – Following the success of a few, the 1990s screens immediately saw themselves being dominated by lurid sexual thrillers, mostly about younger girls trying to jail-bait older men.

But while the sub-genre saw a long gestating subdued death, here and there similar kind of films, even in these day and age, do pop up, attempting to rejuvenate the weird phenomena which gave birth to films like Poison Ivy (1992), Wild Things (1998) and Cruel Intentions (1999).

Same is the case of this feature from first-time writer-director Jade Halley Bartlett which might initially seem like a #MeToo story about relationships with uneven power dynamics, yet ends up playing more like a throwback feature only with a literary bent.

Clearly aiming to bask in on Jenna Ortega‘s pop-culture moment, it retells the classic story of how a teenage girl smitten by her older teacher tumbles into seduction, but even her star power can’t overcome the film’s flaws, which despite its literary pretensions, unlike the aforementioned thrillers is not fun nor sexy enough to justify its existence, struggling to even strike that wild, so-bad-it’s-entertaining chord vigorously.

Produced by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the film is indeed visually compelling throughout, but the narrative elements end up feeling dated and creepy in all the wrong ways. There’s no denying Ortega and Martin Freeman are two acting powerhouses. However, they too lack the level of inappropriate chemistry required to make their character’s attraction remotely believable.

Ambitiously conceived, whether the narrative elements works for any given viewer will depend heavily on their tolerance of manic-gothic Tumblr girl-styled writing.

Set in a remote corner of Tennessee, the story follows Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega), a high school senior and aspiring writer, who joins the literature class under Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), a failed erotic writer who turned to teaching when his only book failed to take off, and is in a loveless marriage to a workaholic and alcoholic wife Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk) who takes a seemingly gleeful amount of pleasure reminding him how far he’s fallen.

Being a bookworm, Cairo has already read his assigned reading, leaving him impressed. Seeing her as the potential for redemption, a protégé he can teach and mold into greatness, Jonathan takes Cairo under his wing as his star pupil, and the two spend time together outside the school grounds, attending writing events.

However, when she sees how her best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) uses flirting with the school’s coach Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) to get what she wants, Cairo uses the early assigned midterm assignment to project her inner desires about him onto the page, catapulting them into a controversial situation.

Visually, this one is an aesthetically pleasing feature. From the outfits to the long shots of Jenna Ortega alone in her mansion, the film boasts stunning cinematography. While it makes no sense to hardly see any more students of fellow teachers at the school, isolating the leads from most of the world works well in showing how loneliness drew them to one another.

But the film’s biggest problem is the relationship between Jon and Cairo, which moves so abruptly from a dangerous but touching set of early connections to the third-act meltdown that it feels like it’s entirely missing the second act.

It’s hard to say how exactly director Bartlett sees their relationship. In some scenes, Jonathan comes across as an understandably lonely man who just admires his student’s writing, while Cairo, for her part, veers back and forth between a sexy schemer and an awkward, isolated teenager who isn’t yet capable of seeing that she can’t claim her teacher as a soulmate.

Yet, the most uncomfortable aspect of the film involves portraying Cairo and her friend Winnie as the vaguely predatory pursuers of their much-older teachers. The latter brazenly flirts with Jonathan’s best pal Boris, by not backing away immediately, appears to be playing with fire as well, just on a slightly lower setting.

Most surprisingly, director Bartlett’s debut feature is more tame than exciting. We get far too much unbelievable yet highly pompous verbiage that never scratches beneath the surface of its narrative. Nothing ever happens and despite the inappropriate dialogue, the ending is as inconsequential as Jonathan’s mostly empty classroom.

Performances wise, Jenna Ortega embodies the allegedly prodigious teenager well and is able to easily swing back and forth between adulthood and childhood without warning. Martin Freeman too shines in his role, and is equally well supported by Bashir Salahuddin, Dagmara Domińczyk and Gideon Adlon, who do their best with the lines they’re given, but it is impossible to elevate this kind of material. On the whole, ‘Miller’s Girl’ is a forgettable affair wrecked by its unsatisfying screenplay and ending.