Miller’s Girl is a dark comedy thriller that explores the boundaries of student teacher relationships and the disastrous fall out that occurs when those lines are crossed. It’s Jade Halley Bartlett’s debut feature film. Her spec script was acquired by Seth Rogen’s production company Point Grey Pictures back in 2016 after spending some time on the Hollywood Blacklist of best unproduced screenplays. Miller’s Girl stars Jenna Ortega as Cairo Sweet, a bright young writer who has become enamored with her high school English teacher Mr. Miller, played by Martin Freeman.

Cairo is an introspective and brooding teenage girl dissatisfied with her life in a quiet Tennessee town. She’s incredibly lonely, both of her parents are never around, and she has resigned herself to escapism through great works of literature. While working on her college admissions essay, Cairo laments to her friend Winnie, the hilarious Gideon Adlon, that she hasn’t accomplished anything of significance worth writing about. The character speaks in long, lofty sentences that sound like poetry, but don’t really amount to anything of substance. It does not help that the first conflict we are introduced to is that her chief complaint in life is boredom. Yes she has absentee parents, but otherwise appears to have a fairly charmed life. She’s intelligent, beautiful, well liked by her peers, and lives in a stunning southern mansion.

At first this way of speaking gives Cairo a unique voice among the typical onscreen representation of teenage girls, but it quickly becomes grating over the course of the movie. It is just one eye roll inducing piece of dialogue after another. She is an edgy, pretentious teenager who is intended to come off that way, however it is incredibly challenging to root for Cairo as a result, despite Ortega’s star power. It is a relief any time one of the supporting characters enters a scene and gives the audience a much needed break from the flowery language. Adlon as Winnie excels here, providing some of the only humorous and lighthearted moments in the entire film.

Over the school break, Cairo reads a semester’s worth of books on Mr. Miller’s syllabus, impressing him with her curiosity and commitment. The two form a mentorship and Mr. Miller pushes Cairo to pursue her writing talents, assisting in developing her college writing portfolio. Mr. Miller offers her an advancement on her midterm assignment, instructing her to write an original short story in the style of an author of her choice. Winnie teases and encourages Cairo to continue to flirt with Mr. Miller, pushing the boundary to test if he will cross it. In response, Cairo chooses to write in the style of author Henry Miller as a means to explore the sexually repressed feelings she has for her teacher.

While Mr. Miller knows his relationship with Cairo is inappropriate, he has trouble pushing her away because he enjoys the adulation he receives from her. I was surprised by how much nuance this character was afforded considering the taboo subject. Mr. Miller is not outright manipulative or simply lusting after Cairo due to her youth, rather his desires are more pathetic than sinister. Mr. Miller is completely emasculated professionally and personally by his wife Beatrice, who is the successful writer he imagined himself to be. She berates and demeans him and her career constantly gets in the way of their marriage. He has never been able to measure up to Beatrice’s success and she does not let him forget it. The case is made that, given these circumstances, of course Mr. Miller wouldn’t deny Cairo’s advances, despite knowing better. His lack of agency and responsibility for his actions, however lead directly to his undoing. 

When Cairo submits an explicit story for her assignment where the two characters are clearly stand-ins for their relationship, he is at once aroused and enraged. The assignment is read aloud by the two leads through voiceover as Mr. Miller masturbates. This is possibly the single most uncomfortable scene in a mainstream release in a long time. Not just because of the sexual content and their inappropriate relationship, but because it is written with the standard fan fiction prose from erotic stories shared online. Stories whose primary purpose is to get people off, not to be great works of fiction. So when this cringeworthy story is read aloud to a full movie theater, the audience is giggling with discomfort and certainly not titillated. When they returns to school, Mr. Miller admonishes Cairo for submitting pornography for a school assignment, demanding that she rewrite it with a new author in mind.

In a fit of fury, Cairo rips into Mr. Miller’s insecurities, devastated that he did not reciprocate despite knowing he feels the same for her. Cairo goes scorched earth, attempting to ruin Mr. Miller’s life with accusations that they had a sexual relationship. The audience never actually sees the extent of their physical relationship, a lot is left intentionally ambiguous. They share an onscreen kiss when he stops by Cairo’s house to drop off her phone and it is suggested that she invited him inside afterwards. Mr. Miller is later dodgy and withdrawn when Beatrice interrogates him about what he actually did with Cairo, implying that there may be some truth to the story she wrote. The last act is centered around Cairo’s quest for vengeance and bringing her case to the school board. It ends with a “good for her” moment, a typical revenge story trope popularized by Midsommar and Gone Girl. 

Miller’s Girl takes big swings when it comes to addressing this taboo subject material in a way that offers more complexity than initially expected. There’s a suggestion that it would be too simple and perhaps not reflective of how these real life relationships form to look at this story in terms of violent abusers and innocent victims, even with the clear power imbalance of their student teacher relationship. The film literally opens with Cairo stating she is 18 years old and confused about the boundary between being a child and an adult. It is perfectly reasonable for a character experiencing this life transition to feel this way, but it ends up coming across like a preemptive argument against the audience’s distaste for the film. As if to say, “don’t worry this movie isn’t about the sexual assault of a child” but I mean, she is still a high school student and he is still her teacher. The film is provocative and knows it, wearing that fact proudly on its sleeve. At one point, Cairo tells Mr. Miller, “if it’s not controversial, I’m not interested in writing it.” Mr. Miller’s class is structured around censorship and its negative effects on literature and artistic expression. And so on. However outside of the salacious nature of the story, there’s really no substantive argument being made about sexuality, agency, art, or otherwise. Miller’s Girl is so wrapped up in prodding at the audience’s discomfort, tempting you to be outraged by its subject, that the finished product as a result is an incoherent and unpleasant film to experience.