My Oxford Year

The Weight of the Syllabus

There is a very specific fantasy lane reserved for Americans studying abroad, especially in England. In it, the cobblestones are permanently wet, every library smells like old books and latent yearning, and the pub locals exist mainly to hand the heroine a pint and a life lesson. I have an embarrassingly soft spot for this stuff, even when it gets silly. *My Oxford Year*, directed by Iain Morris and based on Julia Whelan’s novel, leans into that fantasy so hard it may as well wrap you in a cable-knit blanket and ask you to surrender. For a little while, I almost did.

The setup is familiar to the point of aggression. Anna (Sofia Carson) is a relentlessly organized New Yorker who puts a Goldman Sachs job on hold for one dreamy year studying Victorian poetry at Oxford. She shows up with an actual checklist of British experiences. Naturally, the plan starts wobbling the second she meets Jamie (Corey Mylchreest), a rich, absurdly handsome local who also happens to be her poetry tutor.



Morris is an odd but interesting fit for material like this. He's best known for *The Inbetweeners*, which lives in the grubby embarrassment of British adolescence. Here he swings toward openhearted melodrama, and the shift never entirely settles. He clearly loves photographing Oxford like a postcard, but the script often feels as if it's crowdsourcing emotional wisdom from a Pinterest board. (At one point, Thoreau’s instruction to "live deliberately" is delivered with such naked earnestness that I physically flinched.)

Still, there is an early scene that hints at a sharper movie hiding underneath. After Jamie splashes Anna by driving his sports car through a puddle, they wind up bickering in a fish-and-chip shop. It's a standard meet-cute, sure, but Morris stages it under the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the takeaway instead of the dream-glow Oxford keeps promising. That choice gives the scene some texture. Mylchreest helps, too. He plays Jamie with a bored, slightly drooping ease, like a man very used to women being annoyed with him and not especially energized by it.



Carson, who has basically become one of Netflix's house romantic leads after *Purple Hearts* and *The Life List*, gives Anna a determined chin-up stiffness. You can see what she's reaching for—a Type-A woman trying desperately to hold the seams together—but the genre keeps flattening her. We're told she's brilliant with literature, yet she rarely seems to actually *think* about poetry; it hangs off her like one more accessory, no different from the tartan trench coats. Mylchreest comes off a little better, doing a credible young, slightly bruised Hugh Grant impression. But Dougray Scott, as Jamie's father, is the one who briefly makes the movie feel grounded. He carries himself like a man worn down by an argument he already knows he'll lose, and that sadness brings real weight to a film forever threatening to float away.

Then the film, of course, hits its twist. Halfway through, the fizzy rom-com runs directly into a wall: Jamie isn't just commitment-shy, he's hiding a terminal cancer diagnosis and has chosen to stop treatment. The tonal swerve is severe. Monica Castillo wrote for *Roger Ebert* that the movie basically turns into "a gender-swapped *An Affair to Remember*". That's exactly the kind of pivot we're dealing with.



Whether it lands will come down to your appetite for polished heartbreak. I found myself irritated by how tidy the suffering remains. The movie wants the ache of mortality without any of the humiliating, disordered reality of illness. Even as Jamie gets worse, the lighting stays luminous, the hair holds, and the dialogue keeps reaching for poetry.

It's an easy watch and a hard movie to actually feel. *My Oxford Year* wants to tell us life is brief and we should seize it. Fair enough. I only wish the film itself felt a bit less embalmed.