Save Me From Miller’s Girl

It’s always quite uncomfortable when obvious fanfiction is turned into a movie. A one-on-one intimate conversation between you and the writer turns into a multi-million-dollar endeavour that everyone had to sign onto. The hushed whispers of fetishes and scenarios that embarrass you get caught by the boom mic, and suddenly, you’re sitting in a cinema, sinking into your seat in case you see an old friend who you didn’t know liked this stuff. Even worse when there’s an air of pretension around it: ‘I’m not watching this for the sex, I’m watching it for the story,’ the movie tries to convince you. Okay, you think to yourself, I’m here to be immersed in a psycho-sexual examination of the power a woman’s attention holds over an insecure man; then Bilbo Baggins puts Wednesday in the doggy position, and your illusion falls apart.

The boundary that comes from a paperback erotica just isn’t there anymore. Putting a face to the fetish is never going to be as all-encompassing as your imagination, in the same way that these lifeless shots are never going to fill in for the real thing. These types of movies only really work when you have a psychopath behind the camera who will either show you a sexual fantasy you never knew you had, or the least erotic thing you’ve ever seen (see Paul Verhoeven). With either of these choices, the main difference between those films and Miller’s Girl is that they are unabashedly horny in a way that makes them seem confident in what they are selling. In comparison, Jade Halley Bartlet’s debut feature doesn’t get nearly pulpy enough to indulge in what it really wants to, so we’re just watching bargain-bin smut, which it reads aloud over and over.

Jenna Ortega is doing most of this narration as Cairo Sweet (your first indication this script was written on Tumblr), an 18-year-old student obsessed with literature and creative writing, who lives alone in a mansion on a deserted street while her parents are away. She is aching to escape Tennessee, and you can guess the rest of her personality. As if we hadn’t been tortured enough by insufferably pretentious, copy-paste stereotypes with Saltburn, Cairo introduces herself as ‘entirely unremarkable’, and then mocks the platitudes that she is defining. We are expected to believe her insecure English teacher, Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), becomes infatuated with her despite the obvious cliches of her writing. Maybe this is why the ex-erotic author stopped his work: he couldn’t see a bad romantic stereotype if it were to sit at the front of his class, eye-goggling him.

Miller has a beautiful wife, Beatrice (Dagmara Domińczyk), who is still affectionate towards him, albeit very busy with her work. He has a great job, and a best friend, Boris (Bashir Salahuddin), who brings him chicken biscuits and coffee every morning. Other than his insecurities over having not written since his first failed release, Miller’s life is going well, until Cairo enters and, by sheer will of her brilliance, turns this man’s life upside-down. Another reason why obvious fan fiction like this does not work is that from the outside, the only narrative propulsion is Cairo’s pretentiousness, which pushes us away but only brings Miller in, which makes him look like a crazed lunatic.

I’m not necessarily saying this film has no reason to exist besides further selling Ortega as the next big thing, but when Winnie (Gideon Adlon) convinces Cairo to start seducing Miller, it does sound like an agent putting an actor onto something they know is terrible, just so they can distinguish themselves despite it. A lot of time is spent alone with the two leads staring at each other, in an awkward silence that thinks it’s more meaningful than it is, maybe so we can imagine them in more exciting stuff. When the strange shift from teacher-student sex fantasy to a female revenge story happens, all notions of this being a weird, camp fantasy leave, and we have to deal with the fact that this script thinks it’s a serious work. Unfortunately for Miller’s Girl, and like Cairo, it is the only one who thinks it’s worth anything more.