Call it the Bridgerton effect, which itself was arguably the result of The Crown effect, but the Netflix algorithm is currently aimed toward the UK with moonier eyes than usual. Last month saw Lena Dunham recount her days as an American getting to grips with the realities of London in Too Much, and as production begins on yet another adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, here comes the sudsy romance My Oxford Year where the object of affection is England itself.
One might assume that a university-set film directed by The Inbetweeners creator Iain Morris would be a ribald comedy geared toward a younger male crowd, but My Oxford Year, based on a novel by Julia Whelan, picks sentiment over sauce. It’s a frothy, throwaway fantasy about another American hoping to find herself in another country, think of Emily in Paris but Anna in Oxford. Anna (in-house Netflix star Sofia Carson) is a working-class New Yorker who has decided to defer her job at Goldman Sachs for a year so that she can study at Oxford, indulging her love of literature before she disappears into a life of numbers.
Her idealised view is somewhat confirmed. There’s undeniable historical beauty surrounding her (unlike so many other Netflix films, some on-location shooting helps to seduce those watching too) but in maybe the film’s only really amusing moment, we also see Anna having to reckon with the less postcard-suited side of life as her new friends show her what a perfect English evening looks like: watching an episode of Naked Attraction. Like any of the many Americans before her, from Andie MacDowell to Julia Roberts, she also finds herself falling for a foppish gent, fellow bibliophile Jamie (Bridgerton alum Corey Mylchreest).
They are given a laughably convoluted meet-cute – his fancy car splashes a cartoonishly oversized puddle on her, she then sees him at the chippy and lands him in hot water with the woman he’s hiding from, she then finds out he’s her replacement teacher for the year (!) – and a romance the colour of beige follows. There are initial attempts to add some spice – he’s a privileged fuckboy who leaves conquests in his wake and she’s a salt of the earth overachiever who puts him in his place – but there’s not enough juicy conflict between them. It’s all boringly plain sailing until it suddenly isn’t and the film takes a turn from romcom into something more dramatic.
More dramatic but also less interesting, as Anna finds out why Jamie has been holding back and given how the film handles the reveal like a twist, I’ll spare the details but when it comes, it’s met with a sigh of disappointment for we know exactly what story we’re being told and every single beat that will follow. It’s such well-mined territory that at this stage, to keep us even somewhat invested in such a rehash, we’d need something with far more texture or emotional rawness than this. The unsuccessful swerve then overwhelms any of the potentially knottier, more engaging elements of managing differences of class, choosing between art and commerce and grappling with a life caught between two different continents.
Morris is a competent enough director but the script, from Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne, is devoid of any real electricity, leaving it up to the leads to generate it. Carson is a better fit here than she was at playing a scrappy mess in Netflix’s similarly vanilla hit The Life List, but she’s a little indistinctive, not quite magnetic enough to carry the weight of an every-scene lead performance. There’s more promise in Mylchreest, whose Hugh Grant cosplay is charming enough to suggest that with a sharper, wittier script he could really do something with it.
As passive Netflix watches go – consumed while doing something else, destined to be forgotten about almost instantaneously – it’s better than some but as last year’s adjacent romantic weepie It Ends With Us showed, there’s so much more to be done in territory that often gets unfairly and snobbishly downgraded. There are big, relatable emotions to be mined but that grand sweep just never arrives in My Oxford Year, a late summer vacation that leaves us firmly on the couch.
