'Miller's Girl' Review: More Lust In Cinema, Yes, But Not Like This

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 28, 2024 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | February 28, 2024 |

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve referenced the wonderfully titled essay, ‘Everyone is beautiful and no one is horny,’ when talking about the decline of lust and eroticism in modern mainstream cinema. Written by RS Benedict and published on Blood Knife, it is a spectacular piece, deftly examining this sad state of affairs while tying it to critiques of late capitalist body fascism and neoliberalism in general. It’s a view we’ve shared here too before, a number of times, so a film like Miller’s Girl, which defies many of these regressive, repressive trends, should, in theory, be welcomed with open arms.

That’s the theory, anyway. The unfortunate reality is that while Miller’s Girl certainly isn’t afraid of foregrounding some of those fundamental aspects of human nature that so much of cinema shies away from these days, it also fails to embed those elements into, you know, a good film. As far as I know, this is the director’s debut, so some slack should be given. Nevertheless, I struggle to point out much at all that works in this story of a bored, wealthy teenage girl who finds herself inappropriately involved with the English teacher at her Tennessean high school. It’s only ninety-three minutes long—that’s great and welcome! It’s a throwback to the golden Nineties era of the erotic thriller—that’s cool! But that’s about it.

Other than that, it’s sadly a procession of components and ideas that don’t work. Looming over them all is Martin Freeman’s Tennesseean accent, which might be funny in another context, but which here just feels tragic. I should confess a bit of personal bias at this point, I suppose, as I cannot stand Martin Freeman, so that might be coloring my perception a tad, but even without that filter present, I struggle to see how anyone watching Miller’s Girl could take it seriously, purely because of his accent. Even discarding Freeman, however, we’re still left with the thin characterization, the hilariously pretentious and portentous tone, the botched attempts at ‘mystery’, the rote cinematography, and the painfully overbearing soundtrack.

This is a film that thinks is so much smarter than it is. It wants to have something to say about society, power dynamics, male ego, teenage angst, sexuality, as well as—metatextually—the state of the industry into which it has been released. It doesn’t rise above surface-level engagement with any of those topics. To top it all off, it shoots itself in the foot by wading into the waters of erotic thrillers but doing so clumsily. Bad sex in literature can be so cringeworthy so as to make us laugh out loud. Films often escape this as the visual element can be distracting enough in the moment. Miller’s Girl makes the critical mistake of taking bad sex writing and then layering it on top of the attempts it makes at cinematic eroticism, stopping dead in its tracks any visceral engagement the audience could otherwise—hypothetically—feel from the latter.

One could, I suppose, make the argument that this is all by design, echoing the point of view of a self-important, narcissistic yet naive teen protagonist, but it would be an argument without much substance, born out of desperation, and it still wouldn’t change the fact that Miller’s Girl is a project that desperately needed more time in the workshop.