Miller’s Girl (2024) is directed by Jade Halley Bartlett and stars Jenna Ortega, Martin Freeman, Gideon Adlon, Bashir Salahuddin, and Dagmara Dominczyk. The film follows middle-aged literature professor, Jonathan Miller (Freeman), who becomes infatuated with a brilliant and beautiful student named Cairo Sweet (Ortega). When the relationship takes a less-than-academic turn, Miller and Cairo respond in distinctly different ways. What ensues is a game of cat-and-mouse where power dynamics shift back and forth. The film proceeds to ask: Who truly crossed the line first? And does it really matter?

The performances here are mostly serviceable but feel forgettable due to the film’s overall quality. Ortega continues to have a haunting X-factor as a lead performer, but the performance suffers due to an amateur script. Ortega’s character features a slight southern accent, but its inclusion is inconsistent. When the accent is there, it’s believable. However, the accent disappears at points, breaking the audience’s immersion. Freeman gives the best performance in the film but is likewise failed by the script. His moral struggles are clearly communicated through his physicality and feels perfectly cast as a middle-aged college professor. Where the film really struggles is that neither of these characters as well as the rest of the cast feel likeable in even the slightest sense. Each of the five significant characters displays traits that would be considered immoral and unlikable to most people. The thing is, these traits are dialed in on, refusing to balance them with more likable ones. It results in the viewer just generally not caring about what happens to any of them. 

One of my biggest issues with the film is that it feels so pretentious in various aspects. For example, Jenna Ortega’s character is a freshman literature student who speaks to people as if she’s a genius Pulitzer Prize winner. The character is supposed to be uncommonly confident and smart, but this is just too much to the point of silliness. Especially in the first half, It’s as if the writer is trying to impress us with their immense literary knowledge. It just results in the dialogue feeling unnatural and therefore amateurish. Intelligent people in real life don’t talk like this. They know that the only two goals are clarity and efficiency. Miller’s Girl has neither. Hell, even the character names are pretentious. Cairo Sweet? I mean, c’mon. That sounds like the name of a femme fatale in a 1940s noir. Maybe that parallel is intentional, but then it just comes off as incredibly on the nose. Look, a lot of movies are pretentious, but I still like them. That’s because, with those films, the pretension feels somewhat justified. They deal with big, complex, confusing, or divisive subjects. Miller’s Girl attempts to deal with a complex subject but only analyzes it in a surface-level way. I kept asking myself, what is this movie trying to tell me? If it wasn’t so pretentious, I could just enjoy the film as a basic thriller. However, it features elements such as mysteriously thematic voiceovers that come across as poetry. It sounds nice and all, but it felt as if it didn’t mean anything. To me, it feels like a dirty movie crew attempted to make a “serious film” and the result was Miller’s Girl. 

There’s an element of crudeness to all the sexuality/romance. It’s at odds with the film’s more literary ambitions. Characters will talk like geniuses in one moment and then immediately start talking like 14-year-old boys when it comes to the topic of sex. Relating to this inconsistent level of maturity, the professor characters couldn’t be more unprofessional in the ways that they handle certain situations. Not even a fraction of real teachers are this level of casually scummy. This all just results in the tone feeling extremely confused. At the end of the day, the only way that this movie made me feel was “uncomfortable.” 

The redeeming aspects of the film are its slight explorations into how treating oneself as a constant victim can unwittingly turn you into the victimizer. Also, I enjoyed that the film reuses the same 3-4 sets, providing the feeling of a stage play. It just adds a unique aspect that the film otherwise sorely lacks.

Overall, this is an uncomfortable and confused thriller with an incoherent ending that leaves us asking questions in the worst possible way. The film is too pretentious for its own good and constantly suffers from a tonal identity crisis. Fortunately, it isn’t a complete chore to watch and does provide a small amount of perverse entertainment value. I just wish that with such strong lead actors, we could’ve been given something to take a bit more seriously. C-