Miller's Girl

A poetic cinematic experience that follows Cairo Sweet, a student fond of literature, looking for experiences to write for a writing assignment, and her teacher Jonathan Miller, in a story full of blurry lines.

The social commentary in Miller's Girl is accomplished in a tasteful gothic dreamlike style with a script that gives just enough information to let the audience fill in the blank spaces.

The film's greatest asset is depicting desire as something that has to be realized yet deludes its owner every time its reach is closer to fulfillment, making the situation ambiguously complex. This is rendered brilliantly throughout the film, especially in the dialogues the protagonist has with herself. An open door that lets us in in the melancholic naivety of what it means to be young and flawed in a world that values perfection above all, yet it is found nowhere, and that crave for independence from inherited beliefs, and the natural thrill and anxious ache for the unknown and uncharted territories.

18 year old Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) lives alone in a mansion while her parents are away somewhere. Her new married creative writing teacher Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) takes an interest in her and she returns the interest with obsession. When he rejects her pornographic writing, all hell breaks loose.

This movie oscillates between aggressively written and aggressively overwritten. It is trying so hard to be edgy. Jenna Ortega is oozing her lines out. I almost appreciate how hard it is running with scissors. At the end of the day, I am more annoyed with it than appreciate it. It doesn't help that the movie stops short. There is another fifteen minutes or more to go.

First off hands off to the entire cast. They are quite good in this film and the script especially when the main characters quotes dialogue is really well written. I was expecting something rather poor from the 5.2 review on imdb but I honestly think most people who watched this didn't get the point the director was making.

Jenna Ortega plays a fairly unbelievable character let's get that out there not only is she a siren but she has a plan and is incredibly clever, well if you know anything about 18 year olds this is quite far fetched. Martin Freeman is the naive muse in an Luke warm marriage flattered by the attraction and attention of a young good looking fan and it spirals in a rather prectible way but what makes this better than most fatal attraction movies is his conduct I don't want to mention spoilers in my reviews but he got burned for a thought.

It tries to have this sexual tension between the main characters all the time. They had no chemistry, they did supposedly have reasons for pursuing each other but it wasn't depicted in a convincing manner. Sometimes I liked it, sometimes I didn't. It had the potential to be something better. The only scene I enjoyed is when Cairo lit up a cigarette in the dark, that looked like something that could've been in a horror movie. The voice narration seemed over the top and unnatural. Felt like the movie was trying too hard. The narration also reminded me of Delores from Westworld.

Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman were okay but the movie wasn't the most captivating. It's a story that's been done before so it really needed to offer something different. But in the end feels pretty unremarkable and you'll probably forget about it as you leave the theatre. I didn't really care much about what happens with the characters and some of the conversations made me sigh and roll my eyes. I did think it was interesting where the movie took the story and shift in power dynamic between the two, but it could've been written better. Especially if you go and watch gone girl or thoroughbreds. It could've been a more captivating revenge story.

Miller's Girl presents a perspective of a romantic affair between a student (Jenna Ortega as Cairo Sweet) and its teacher (Martin Freeman as Jonathan Miller). It is a very ambitious and intriguing idea to explore, I really liked the plot and how it slowly unfolded, how the characters evolved and how eventually Cairo and Martin turned out to be complex characters that carried a lot of personal and professional baggage yet they connected and felt heard and understood thanks to their mutual interest in literature and writing. Now, obviously there's a lot more that's going on, more nuances, subtlety and delicacy and not to even mention the other "situationship" presented but it makes you wonder on another level... does love have limits? Is there such a thing as a forbidden love? Does even right or wrong exist when love is involved? Or, at the same time... is it really about love or is it something else?

Both Freeman and Ortega deliver good performances and it serve their characters well, but it sometimes felt during the first acts like they lacked that chemistry, that connection that was supposed to urge their attraction, desire, tension; that "I want it so bad that nothing else matters"; their interaction with other characters involved seemed more natural than when they were together.

Jade Halley Bartlett creates this motion picture with a sort of aristocratic dark fantasy visual language and score in mind which plays an important part in the production itself especially in certain scenes implying the ideas of mystery, of desire, even of the forbidden and the unacceptable - yet, it felt a bit all over the place and unnecessary at times because it created a few clichés such as the mysterious girl that comes out of a misty forest thingy and it just pulls you out of the story.

Throughout the film it seems to be an incomplete puzzle yet in such a good way because you get most of the pieces, but you also have to create the missing ones by yourself. The ending is arguably the most impactful and well made on this matter because even though an open ending is not reinventing the wheel, this time the final scene can actually be interpreted in such many ways, all of them viable and credible since, as earlier mentioned, the film was packed with many nuances and tones, hints and implies of what actually might have happened.

The film is pretty good when reflected a bit upon it.