Netflix’s New Lust Movie Is The Ultimate Expression Of The TikTok Generation

The new Netflix film My Oxford Year advertises itself as a rom-com, but there’s a twist that’s meant to break your heart. Unfortunately, the movie fails as both a romance and a comedy, and the twist in question (beware spoilers in the rest of this review) is as hollow as it is blatantly manipulative. The result is a movie made for the TikTok generation, comprised of a handful of quote moments that, like the heroine’s emotional journey, never add up to anything substantial.

The heroine in question is a bright young woman who has already graduated top of her class at Cornell and has a Goldman Sachs job offer waiting for her. She has deferred that offer for one year so she can complete her nerdy anglophile dream of studying at Oxford. With all the subtlety this leaden script can manage (and that’s none whatsoever), her perfectly planned life falls apart when she gets hot for teacher; in this case, a doctoral student who tutors and occasionally serves as teaching assistant for her Oxford English professor.

My Oxford Year has plenty of structural problems in its script, but the movie’s most fundamental failure is that these two romantic leads (Sofia Carson and Corey Mylchreest) have no romantic chemistry together whatsoever. Both seemed like they walked right out of central casting when the director (Iain Morris, a solid writer whose directorial experience is limited almost entirely to television) asked for “pretty college students.” Both are certainly easy on the eyes, but these two look like they have as much passion for each other as two Abercrombie and Fitch mannequins thrust together in a crowded store window.

The movie often feels crowded by Oxford itself, and the singular best thing about the film is that it features one beautiful shot after another of the venerable University. After a while, though, it becomes apparent that Oxford is a bit like our romantic leads–something pretty to put in front of the camera to make up for what the script is lacking. This sterile beauty is still preferable, though, to the script’s other way of making up for its failings: shoving one tortured literary reference after another down our throats like an AI chatbot trained exclusively on SparkNotes.

“My Oxford Year feels more like an Oxford coma.”

The lack of chemistry undermines the film’s attempts at romance, and its attempts at comedy fall similarly flat at every turn. Eventually, we get to the big twist: the man our heroine has fallen in love with is dying from a cancer that he refuses to treat because he saw his brother die miserably despite getting the best cancer treatment in the world courtesy of their wealthy parents. He wants to live life authentically and treatment-free until he dies, and this revelation signifies the movie’s sudden flip into a maudlin drama filled with platitudes you might normally find on “hang in there” cat posters.

I felt disengaged from this movie from beginning to end, and that’s when I realized that it was less like a film and more like an emoji. That is, the two-dimensional characters, schmaltzy setups, and heartstring-tugging twists all feel like a disconnected Zoomer’s distant idea of what actual emotions might look like. There is no passion, no joy, no genuine yearning in this dimestore romance because the writers should have taken the same advice they gave to our protagonist: to live deliberately and experience life for the fullest rather than fixate on a few pretty words that have no personal meaning.

It’s a romance that turns you off, a comedy that doesn’t make you laugh, and a drama that makes you feel nothing at all. My Oxford Year is meant to be a tale of doomed romance for younger audiences, but its limp approach to every facet of storytelling reduces a would-be sweeping epic to nothing more than a disposable meme–something to react to and instantly forget. If you want to see pretty people pretending they care about each other, you’ll find far more enjoyment from a random PornHub clip than this tedious Oxford coma of a film.