Miller's Girl

Miller's Girl is a 2024 American erotic thriller film written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett. The film stars Jenna Ortega and Martin Freeman as a student and teacher who enter into a complicated relationship after a creative writing assignment.

Miller's Girl was theatrically released in the United States by Lionsgate on January 26, 2024. The film received mixed reviews from critics.

Plot
Cairo Sweet, an 18-year-old girl, lives alone in her wealthy family's mansion in Tennessee. Her attorney parents are away on a business trip while she completes her senior year in high school. Cairo takes the creative writing class of teacher Jonathan Miller, and impresses him with her wide knowledge in literature and her familiarity with Miller's own book, Apostrophes and Ampersands. Miller has not written since he got married and started teaching. His emotionally unavailable wife, Beatrice, is a more successful author who disdains her husband's lack of ambition and failure to write new material.

Cairo has to write a college admission essay for Yale University, with the subject being "the greatest achievement to date", but she cannot find anything worthy to write about. Winnie, Cairo's best friend, tells her to experience the excitement of a teacher-student affair such as she intends to do with the school's gym teacher, Boris Fillmore, who is Miller's best friend. Seeing the intellectual connection between Cairo and Miller, Winnie suggests Cairo seduce Miller.

Cairo and Miller begin to spend more time together outside class, sharing common interests in novels, poems and Tennesseean culture. Miller assigns Cairo to write a short story in the style of her favorite author, and she chooses Henry Miller; despite being reluctant due to the author's provocative style, Miller approves. When he accidentally takes Cairo's cell phone, she asks him to return it personally. When Miller arrives at her parents' mansion, Cairo welcomes him in a sexy dress and kisses him in the rain. Inspired, she writes an erotic short story about a sexual relationship between a teacher and his student. While Miller reads it alone, he gets aroused and masturbates to it.

Miller declares the story unacceptable and demands that Cairo rewrite it, but she calls out his cowardice and hypocrisy. Offended by Miller's rejection, Cairo sends the story to the school's vice principal, Joyce Manor, as revenge to expose a possible affair between them. She also takes advantage of Winnie's attraction to her by convincing her to send sexual photos of themselves to Fillmore, leading them to undress and kiss passionately.

Manor questions Cairo and Miller separately about their relationship. Despite claiming that nothing inappropriate has happened between them, Miller has to take full responsibility as the adult in the situation, resulting in his suspension. This causes a rift in his friendship with Fillmore, who blames him for not knowing his limits as a teacher. An argument with Beatrice about what happened also prompts Miller to vent his repressed anger at his wife and point out the nature of their marriage.

Realizing what Cairo's actions have done to Miller, Winnie asks her to withdraw the charges against him, but Cairo refuses, calling Miller's downfall her "greatest achievement to date." She writes her experiences into her admission essay in the same style Miller used in his book. Miller, having reached rock bottom but inspired for the first time in years, decides to write a new book.

Production
In December 2016, Jade Halley Bartlett's spec script for Miller's Girl was acquired by Seth Rogen's company Point Grey Pictures and listed in the Hollywood Black List of unproduced screenplays.

In September 2022, it was reported that Lionsgate Films had picked up distribution rights for the film, that Bartlett would direct, and that Martin Freeman and Jenna Ortega would star. A week later, it was announced that Gideon Adlon, Bashir Salahuddin, Dagmara Domińczyk, and Christine Adams had joined the cast. That same month principal photography took place in Cartersville, Georgia.

Release
Miller's Girl premiered at Palm Springs Film Festival on January 11, 2024, followed by a release in theaters by Lionsgate on January 26, 2024. It was released on digital formats in the United States on February 16, 2024, followed by a release in the United Kingdom on February 19.

Reception
CNN's Brian Lowry called the film "a sort-of psychological, semi-erotic drama that, despite its literary pretensions, possesses roughly the intellectual heft of a perfume ad. Dated and creepy in all the wrong ways, it’s a movie that might have escaped derision in the 1980s but deserves to get slapped around today." Kyle Smith of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "At times Miller's Girl has the feel of a stagey, self-consciously literary psychological drama; at others it seems like creepy noir about a femme fatale determined to ruin a randomly chosen man... Only a generous grader would award this script anything better than a D-plus."

The Messenger's Jordan Hoffman gave Miller's Girl a score of 6.5/10, calling it "a brooding, bookish and bursting-with-pheromones thriller" but adding, "after a splendid build-up, there is some serious lack of momentum that comes after the release of a narrative turn."