What happens when admiration turns into obsession and mentorship crosses a dangerous line?
Miller’s Girl follows the unsettling dynamic between Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega), a gifted teenage writer, and her English teacher, Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman). With her parents often away traveling the world, 18-year-old Cairo is left to her devices living in a big mansion with only literature to keep her company.
Cairo ends up taking Miller’s creative writing class, and the two have an instant intellectual connection. She begins to blossom creatively under his mentorship, and he finds joy in spending time with her, rather than his emotionally unavailable wife, Beatrice. But almost too quickly, the line between inspiration and intimacy begins to blur between teacher and student, and with it comes devastating consequences.
What begins as a story about talent and mentorship slowly spirals into an emotional tug-of-war filled with manipulation, desire, blurred boundaries, and the fallout of choices no one is ready to claim responsibility for.
Miller’s Girl is less a coming-of-age tale and more a slow-burn character study. One that, according to Bartlett, refuses to offer easy heroes or clear-cut villains. Both leads navigate a minefield of power imbalances, secrets, and the ways people justify their worst instincts. It’s ultimately an uncomfortable, tightly wound narrative about control, perception, and the stories we tell ourselves to live with our choices.
In an interview with ComingSoon, director and writer Jade Halley Bartlett talks about how she explored the gray areas of what happens in the film: “Because I think young girls [are] deeply to terribly, ludicrously romantic. There’s a lot of horror in that. I describe this movie as a romantic horror. It’s been called a thriller, which I think is misleading. I don’t know that it’s really a thriller. I think it’s just a terrifying character study of people who make a lot of wrong choices and people who aren’t the perfect victim or the perfect villain.. Real people are morally and ethically gray, so I wanted to have the reality of that set in a world that was three feet off of the ground.”
