Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Miller’s Girl’ on VOD, an Erotic Thriller Led by Jenna Ortega That’s Stirring Up Controversy

Oh boy. Miller’s Girl (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) casts Jenna Ortega as a teenage student who walks into Martin Freeman’s class and – well, like I said, oh boy. The directorial debut of Jade Halley Bartlett is a pseudo-steamy drama slash comedy slash thriller about FORBIDDEN LUST or, as the script might put it, VERBOTEN APPETENCE. It likes big words, see, since it’s about writers who are really turned on by those things. But does the film get us going with its robust sensual proclivities or just leave us hanging there?  

MILLER’S GIRL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Her name is Cairo Sweet (Ortega). Yep. Cairo Sweet. I know. I’m sorry. I just report the facts here. She lives alone in a gothic mansion with six pillars and meticulously trimmed hedges out front. Her parents left her there alone with her books and trust fund. She’s 18. In grating and wordy voiceover narration, she says she’s never left this small town of whatever it is, Tennessee, choosing instead to immerse herself in literature. Like, she props herself atop a plush pile of emerald-green pillows and blankets in an old bathtub and reads James Joyce by choice. Every day she walks alone through a misty forest and emerges at her high school. That’s who Cairo f—ing Sweet is. 

Oh, she also reads the notoriously frankly sexual works of Henry Miller, so it’s funny that her creative writing teacher is Mr. Miller (Freeman). What a mighty coincidence. Methinks destiny is afoot! Cairo Sweet walks into Mr. Miller’s classroom and he says welcome and she says hello and she’s already read everything on the class reading list. The pillow-tub must be quite comfy! In her pile of books is, believe it or not, “Apostrophes and Ampersands.” What’s that, you ask? It’s Mr. Miller’s book. I’ll say it again: Oh boy. This makes Mr. Miller the subject of ribbing by his coworker buddy Boris Fillmore (Bashir Salahuddin), who lightly flirts with Cairo Sweet’s best friend Winnie (Gideon Adlon), who heavily flirts with everyone. The dynamic here is thicker than Granny’s triple-layer cornbread, and twice as dense.

Every night, Mr. Miller goes home to his wife Beatrice (Dagmara Dominczyk), who’s too busy writing and drinking and writing and falling out of her dressing gown and writing to finish what she starts inside his pants. This is absolutely on-the-nose context for what happens next. He reads Cairo Sweet’s short story and ends up quoting it back to her right off the top of his head, but don’t get too excited, because he has a photographic memory. Cairo Sweet responds by quoting “Apostrophes and Ampersands” right back to him. Wow. “Don’t you get scared walking through those woods?” Mr. Miller asks her one morning. “I’m the scariest thing in there,” is her reply, and don’t you believe it.  

Notably, Mr. Miller’s book didn’t even flop – it was greeted with a big indifferent shrug from the cold, cold universe. He became a teacher and decades went by and he didn’t write anything again, something Beatrice reminds him of a bit too frequently. Maybe he needs some inspiration? The mutual admiration between Mr. Miller and Cairo Sweet becomes affection. Before you know it, she’s followed Winnie’s advice and ditched the girlish ankle socks for thigh-highs, and she and her old-enough-to-be-her-father teacher are sharing cigarettes and sitting too close together at a poetry reading. He challenges her with an assignment: Write a short story in the style of her favorite author. So she writes like Henry Miller, with all the naughty words and everything. OH. BOY.

Our Take: Mr. Miller is very impressed with Cairo Sweet’s use of the word “vituperative.” But I dunno – “contumelious” would have been more arousing, since it can only be found in the deepest, most succulent recesses of the thesaurus. Such cheeky crapola – I’m generously assuming it intends to be cheeky, and not serious, although it’s honestly hard to tell – is Miller’s Girl’s Achilles heel. It’s thick with People Don’t Talk Like That dialogue, ever so heightened, elevated so far into the thin air of the stratosphere that it doesn’t realize it’s lightheaded, and doomed to tumble a long way back down to earth for a spectacular crash. 

Balance that faux-intellectual fodder with a faux-sleaziness echoing ’80s-style jailbait erotic thrillers – it’s ultimately too timid to be more than an echo – and you’ve got an unintentionally amusing mess. As Ortega vamps unconvincingly and Freeman mews like a horny stooge and the pull-and-tug (sorry) sexual power dynamics grow increasingly muddled, I couldn’t help but wonder what Bartlett was trying to say with this film. If it’s a treatise on the mysteries of the creative process, it’s a listless cliche: Mr. Miller has settled into the type of comfortable rut that doesn’t have enough rutting to get the writerly juices flowing. If it’s exploring the clash between base hormonal attraction and moral propriety, it flounders haplessly; there are no #MeToo threads to be unraveled here. It ultimately feels like an act of senseless provocation, except it doesn’t quite know how to be provocative. 

Our Call: Here’s a big fat five-cent college word for you: Miller’s Girl sucks. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.