REVIEW: ‘My Oxford Year’ Is A Whole Lot Of Cliché
- Emma Fisher
- 10 hours ago
- 4 min read
This article contains major spoilers for My Oxford Year.
Releasing August 1 on Netflix, My Oxford Year stars Sofia Carson as Anna de la Vega, a high-achieving American who defers a Wall Street job for a year to study Victorian poetry at the University of Oxford. Leaning into every fish-out-of-water trope it can find and refusing to let go of them, Anna arrives full of intentions of self-discovery. Instead, she finds that her earliest memories involve being drenched by a passing car and standing in a fish and chip shop, confused about whether she’s being offered “haddock” or “a duck.” It’s all a touch cringeworthy.
It’s in that same fish and chip shop that she meets Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), the very man who splashed her, now cowering from a girl he’s ghosted. Crawling on the floor in hopes of avoiding confrontation, Jamie is introduced as a posh playboy, which makes it all the more painful when he turns out to be Anna’s stand-in professor. Her academic inspiration, Professor Styan, the whole reason she came to Oxford, has just been promoted to head of graduate studies and is no longer teaching her cohort.
Despite their rocky start, Jamie takes a different approach to teaching, one that involves offering Victoria Sponge cake to his students. If you're British, it's enough to make you sigh out loud. He then asks Anna to read "First Fig" by Edna St. Vincent Millay aloud so her classmates can hear the poem in its original American cadence. He insists that poetry shouldn’t just be analysed, it should be lived, tried, and tested. Where others are touched, Anna’s not impressed. She didn’t fly across the Atlantic to be taught by a smug DPhil student.
As this is a romance, inevitably, sparks begin to fly. Between seminars, a pub night with new friends (where Anna is treated to a debate about British vs American superiority that ends in a pint-to-the-crotch incident), and one-on-one meets, the tension between Anna and Jamie shifts from lukewarm to flirtatious. He sings "Yellow" by Coldplay at karaoke (the worst Coldplay-related incident to happen recently, trust me) and takes her for a kebab at Dimitri’s after, introducing her to what she believes is elephant meat. Despite her initial confusion, she likes it. She likes him. When he walks her back to her flat, she kisses him, then invites him in for “tea and crumpets” - a euphemism no one should refer to again. While Jamie turns her down that night, he soon takes her to Duke Humfrey's Library, where their relationship hits new milestones in and out of his car.
Just as you’re settling into the rom-com routine, the film changes course and Jamie begins to pull away. When Anna heads to his place and finds him hooked up to a drip, everything changes. It turns out that Jamie has a hereditary illness, the same one that killed his brother Eddie, and he’s decided to stop treatment. What began as a bubbling romance shifts into emotional melodrama, complete with tearful confrontations, late-night collapses, and declarations shouted into the rain or Oxford’s crowds.
Despite this tonal pivot, the film doesn’t quite earn its emotional stakes. The romance is charming in places but ultimately feels rushed. One minute, Anna can’t stand Jamie, believing him to be a womaniser who couldn’t love a woman for longer than six months; the next, she’s kissing him, inviting him inside her place. The illness storyline feels added on, as if someone realised that they needed higher stakes in the final act, rather than treating it with the weight it deserved from the moment Jamie and his father (Dougray Scott) clashed over his choices.
Still, there are moments that land. In a one-on-one session with Jamie about an assignment, he asks Anna to choose a different poem, one that speaks to her, not to him or his ill treatment of women. She chooses "Dover Beach" by Matthew Arnold. She interprets it to mean that the reality of life is that it’s hard, but at least we have each other, and he's impressed that she found hope in the single most pessimistic poem of the Victorian era. It’s a rare moment of sincerity in a film otherwise built on clichés and stereotypes.
In the end, Anna stays in Oxford, choosing poetry over corporate life in New York and growth over a paycheque. She teaches Victorian literature in Jamie’s place, echoing his words about living poetry, not just studying it, because it will change your life.
My Oxford Year is a predictable but serviceable romantic drama. It’s emotionally shallow, narratively safe, and occasionally insufferable, but honestly, what more should you expect?
Rating: ★½☆☆☆
About My Oxford Year
Premiere Date: August 1, 2025
Executive Producers: Marty Bowen, Wyck Godfrey, Laura Quicksilver, Isaac Klausner
Writers: Allison Burnett, Melissa Osborne
Director: Iain Morris
Distribution: Netflix
Cast: Sofia Carson, Corey Mylchreest, Dougray Scott, Catherine McCormack, Harry Trevaldwyn, Esmé Kingdom, Poppy Gilbert
Synopsis: An ambitious American fulfilling her dream of studying at Oxford falls for a charming Brit hiding a secret that may upend her perfectly planned life.