‘Miller’s Girl’ Review — Silly, sordid, preposterously pretentious… and an absolute scream
A review of the new erotic thriller, in theaters now
“What is an adult?” Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) wonders in voiceover at the beginning of Miller’s Girl, a preposterously pretentious erotic thriller set at a Tennessee high school. Cairo lives alone in a house abandoned to her by her parents, who she says are permanently on vacation in Europe. She views herself as a ghost, someone who haunts her small town reading literature, thank you very much, and dreaming of escape. “It’s positively Gothic,” she narrates. “I don’t care about being hot,” she tells her friend. “I care about being smart.”
Oh, honey.
That question of adulthood powers the film. The movie establishes early that Cairo is eighteen; that way, when she begins to seduce her English teacher, we aren’t supposed to be worried about legality, exactly. Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman) is a failed writer, a guy who published a book of short stories long ago that got bad reviews. He hasn’t written since. Instead, he’s teaching high school English in this Bumfuck Nowhere town in Tennessee.
Still, he sees something in his new pupil. She carries a carefully curated stack of books to class on her first day, including Finnegan’s Wake, Henry Miller’s Under the Roofs of Paris, and Jonathan Miller’s own Apostrophes & Ampersands. (What a ridiculous, highfalutin title! It tells you everything you need to know about how seriously this movie takes its milieu: just seriously enough to poke fun at it.) Cairo is the kind of girl who uses words like “abnegate” and “vituperation” conversationally, peppering every sentence with five-dollar words the way Valley Girls color their speech with “like.”
And she dresses like a schoolgirl fantasy. It’s as much a conscious costume as what Britney Spears wore in the “…Baby One More Time” music video, all pleated skirts and collared shirts, and director Jade Halley Bartlett’s closeups emphasize Jenna Ortega’s doey, expressive eyes and her freckled face.
It isn’t long before Mr. Miller is hooked, because of course this man would fall for such a collection of cliches. It’s not exactly a falling for one another, Cairo ruminates, because that doesn’t imply intention. They intentionally pursue one another. He invites her to a local poetry reading; she takes up smoking so she’ll have a reason to sit next to him before school, out by the track amid the misty kudzu. He tells himself that they’re only bonding on an intellectual level, and she tells herself that they’re two writers who have found one another, two kindred spirits. Still, we see the way his gaze lingers, the way he leans all too casually into her.
Miller is unhappy at home; his alcoholic wife Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk) is still a working writer, and he feels emasculated by that. Cairo compliments him, makes him feel appreciated. So what if she and her friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon) are being overtly sexual at school? Miller’s physics teacher friend Coach Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin) seems to have his own thing going on with Winnie, so what’s the harm if Miller indulges Cairo more than he should?
And if he tells her to write her own story in the style of Henry Miller, giving her permission to be provocative, profane, even pornographic — an act that makes her into both Henry Miller’s girl and Jonathan Miller’s girl, get it? — then, well, who needs to know?
The dialogue in Miller’s Girl is stylized and turgid; if Ortega and Freeman have chemistry (and they do), it’s because they’re both having an utter blast spouting purple prose at one another as if they were starring in a just-uncovered Tennessee Williams play. Dominczyk in particular is an absolute scream, drunkenly swanning about her house in satin robes and lingerie; when she warns her husband that “Teenage girls are dangerous, full of emotional violence and vituperation,” she savors the last word with all the syrupy-drawled conviction of Elizabeth Taylor mocking Paul Newman in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
But this isn’t Tennessee Williams; it’s Tennessee Williams by way of Wild Things, a shamelessly sordid thriller content to not just violate conventions of taste and tact but ignore them entirely. It’s an over-the-top experience that titillates and teases the audience, almost daring you to use the phrase “age gap” in your Letterboxd review.
In fact, as the movie reached a feverish, florid climax that brings Cairo and Miller’s mutual attraction to a tremendously tasteless act of culmination, the girl in front of me said “What?!” out loud, pulled out her phone, and started reading Letterboxd reviews right there in the theater, with another half hour of the movie left to go. This is that kind of film, one whose provocations are so stylized and silly that they provoke an odd sort of glee rather than any intellectual stimulation.
And that’s perfectly fine! This movie is destined to be discovered by a certain subset of too-online teen, perhaps the kind of kid who sees themselves in Cairo’s desire to go to Yale because she hears the literacy rates are higher there. Sure, it’s got about as much to say about power relations, literature, and, yes, age gaps in media as, well, Saltburn has to say about class. That is: not all that much.
But also, who cares about that when a movie is having so much fun pretending to take itself seriously? In the movie’s final act, as Ortega gets to unleash her budding Scream Queen self and go full bunny-boiler, it occurred to me that I’d love to see Cairo Sweet go head to fucked-up head with Saltburn’s Oliver Quick.
She might just win.