Miller’s Actually-She’s-Eighteen
The following piece contains spoilers for the film Miller's Girl (2024), as well as some NSFW discussion. Pithy Letterboxd -style review (read: attempted virality): They finally made a movie adaptation of the YA-obsessed adult’s idea of what adult literature is. You might get the impression a movie about an inappropriate student-teacher relationship that opens with the line “What is an adult?” and ends with Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” is some kind of self-aware parody or satire. While Jade Halley Bartlett’s Miller’s Girl (2024) certainly has moments of what might generously be called “clarity” (re. subjects like writing and sexual dynamics)—more tortuously: “quasi-didactic”—it feels more or less like a straightforward, even predictable telling of this kind of story. (Or, in an era of excessive self-awareness—“He’s Right Behind Me, Isn’t He?”—maybe this is the radical approach.) I found the film’s tone fascinating, however. There are fleeting notes of horror in the visuals and sou...