My Oxford Year
By Sioph W. Leal
My Oxford Year follows Anna De La Vega (Sophia Carson), a highly organised and career minded young woman who is about to embark on a year of study in Oxford, England. Anna has everything planned, and after spending a year studying Victorian poetry, she will be returning to the United States where a wall street job is waiting for her. At least that was the plan. When she meets Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), he’s everything she isn’t, a dreamer and someone who doesn’t take life too seriously, and alters Anna’s life completely.
Anna is supposed to be this goal-oriented woman who came to Oxford for the libraries (yes, that’s her reasoning) and history. We experience Oxford through her eyes, but somehow My Oxford Year manages to strip away any authentic feeling of a university experience through Anna’s point of view. Part of this is due to Anna’s judgemental and frustratingly rigid and captious personality. Part of the issue remains that Carson’s performance feels like a carbon copy of her other Netflix work such as Purple Hearts and The Life List. Her character and overall plot seem like it’s an odd mixture of both of her previous movies.
One of the standouts has to be Mylchreest. My Oxford Year tries incredibly hard to paint him as a stereotypical born-from-privileged womaniser, but Mylchreest brings this natural charm and warmth to Jamie, he’s the one of the few things that will keep you watching. Mylchreest certainly uses My Oxford Year to showcase that he belongs in more romantic pieces, hopefully one with a more enthusiastic scene partner and a plot that doesn’t change every twenty minutes.
A romantic drama is only as good as the chemistry and moments between the romantic leads. Mylchreest gives his all in all of his scenes, while Carson’s Anna flits from being disinterested to suddenly wanting to kiss him with no clear indication that she actually likes Jamie. The dynamic between Anna and Jamie is incredibly uneven, often rushed. What should be key moments in their romantic story is shown through a rushed montage that is further hindered by Anna’s aloofness. It’s because of these rushed, and often skipped, romantic moments that when it comes to a big romantic, emotional reveal from Anna, it does nothing to generate any feeling from the viewership, which is a shame given Mylchreest’s charm.
The supporting cast unfortunately is no better. Rather than enhancing the story, the supporting cast impedes the already convoluted and rushed story. It doesn’t help that My Oxford Year has a very inconsistent tone. The first part of the movie is set up to be your typical romantic drama, but then the latter half decides to introduce a genetic cancer that is slowly killing a family, both in the literal and emotional sense that isn’t fully explored. The change comes out of nowhere in an attempt to make the movie something else. Plot twists can work to deliver emotional punches but this one completely changes the movie's genre and not in a good way.
My Oxford Year clearly wanted a poignant inspiring movie about living for the fleeting moments of life but didn't achieve that. It could have been so much more than a jumble of cliché plots, rushed relationships and inconsistent characters make this a perfect movie to put on in the background. It had the chance to live up to its aim of being poetically beautiful, but didn’t due to the fact it had rushed moments, all too familiar characters from previous bodies of work and chemistry that felt one sided.