‘Miller’s Girl’ Review: A Small-Town Teen Learns That Adult Ambition Comes at a Steep Price
variety.comTodd Gilchrist editor “Miller’s Girl,” about a relationship that develops between a wise-beyond-her-years teenager and her intellectually undernourished teacher, feels like catnip for the circular discourse of Film Twitter, but it’s hard to tell where a study of post-#MeToo power dynamics will land with moviegoers in the real world.
Written, produced and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, the film is both impressively erudite and unrelentingly self-aware, a combination it bravely attempts but doesn’t quite fully balance.
But Jenna Ortega’s movie-star confidence in the title role more than eclipses Martin Freeman’s shoe-leather character acting, a perhaps inevitable outcome given the age and gender politics exercised in its story — but not necessarily one that gets at something truly interesting.
Ortega (“Wednesday”) plays Cairo Sweet, a high school student living in a small Tennessee town while her absent lawyer parents travel the globe on unnamed business.
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