Written And Directed by Jade Halley Bartlett
Jonathan: "Don't you get scared, walking through those woods?"
Cairo: "I'm the scariest thing in there."
Doing some channel hopping last night, I opted for a short movie, recently released that wasn't in my usual things to watch and I went with this. I did not choose wisely I'm afraid.
In the short space of time, Jenna Ortega has definitely catapulted her career as an actor, picking a succession of projects clearly to test her range as an actor as well as her general appeal outside a social media prism. I can't commend that enough.
Unfortunately while this movie definitely saw something of a departure for her (and I can see why she would go for something like this) but I think she picked a dud. It's a shame because on paper, this could've been a winner.
In this largely uneven "erotic thriller", Ortega plays an insufferably precocious rich high school student named Cairo Sweet, who decided to take a creative writing class for extra credit. The class being ran by burned out writer Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) and soon, both teacher and student find themselves bonding.
Well, in truth, it's more a case of Cairo and Jonathan massaging each others egos, leading to a writing assignment where Jonathan encouraged Cairo to write like one of her favourites. She chose Henry Miller (banned on the school curriculum) and penned a tepid/horribly derivative prose on an affair between a teacher and a student. Needless to say that Jonathan wasn't impressed at all by this.
Of course he had good reason to as it didn't take long for everyone except Cairo's friend, Winnie (Gideon Adlon) to assume it was true. In rapid succession, Jonathan lost his job, his wife Beatrice (Dagmara Domnczyk) and even his biscuit baking coach friend, Boris (Bashir Salahudden) chewed him out. Still, at least he got out of his writers block.
- The movie kept highlighting that Winnie was a lesbian with a crush on Cairo. Cairo stole her idea to seduce a teacher.
- Cairo certainly wore a lot of white in her scenes with Jonathan with some bits of black too.
- Standout music: Johnny Copeland's There's A Blessing.
- Chronology: Set during a school semester, seems to be in the 2020s.
Miller's Girl tried too hard to be a subversive take on the old erotic thriller genre and wound up being too tepid for its own good. There's a decent comment on emotional violence (which Cairo lived up to) but overall, it's just a messy movie with characters too exasperating to care about.
Rating: 5 out of 10
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