MY OXFORD YEAR - Mark Reviews Movies

My Oxford Year, Netflix

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 1, 2025

It's tough to buy much of anything in My Oxford Year, and that's not just because the movie switches gears so drastically about the midway point. It starts as a formulaic romantic comedy, in which every step is as predictable as they come, and then, it wants to become far more serious, only to lend itself to the clichés and schmaltziness of a different brand of romance story.

Beyond that, there's the fact of its main character. She's Anna (Sofia Carson), an overachiever with such good fortune that it's difficult to accept the charmed nature of her life. She worked hard in school, obviously, and was rewarded with a well-paying job at a high-profile financial firm.

That's not enough for Anna, however, who decides to defer her employment for a year (Is Wall Street really that hard-up for employees that the company would be fine with that, or is she just that picture-perfect a person?), so that she can travel to England and study Victorian literature at Oxford University. It has been her dream to do that, even if her education and career prospects don't possess a hint of that, and thankfully, she is apparently so indispensable in everything and to everyone who encounters her that her graduate education is completely covered, of course.

Anna's life is a dream, which, one supposes, makes her the ideal candidate for a movie that doesn't seem to have a foot or even a toe stepped in reality. To describe the plot here is almost unnecessary, although it might be helpful to at least offer a basic starting point. After exploring the school and going through her orientation, Anna decides to check out the off-campus sights. It rained recently, and as she walks down the sidewalk, a classic car speeds by and hits a puddle, which completely drenches her.

Does it need to be said that the man of her dreamy-life dreams was driving the car? He's Jamie Davenport (Corey Mylchreest), the privileged son of an old aristocratic family, and sure enough, he just happens to walk into the fish-and-chips joint where Anna has stopped. Most romantic comedies struggle to find one meet-cute that's legitimately clever or, at least, cute, and to cover all of its bases, the screenplay by Allison Burnett and Melissa Osbourne, an adaptation of Julia Whelan's novel, decides to try on about three of them.

Not only does Jamie splash Anna with his car and end up crawling on the floor of the fish-and-chip place to avoid a woman who's looking for him, the guy is also the teaching assistant of the one professor from whom Anna desperately wants to learn. The teacher got a promotion, and sure enough, Jamie is taking over her class for the entirety of Anna's time at Oxford.

These are all first-act matters, by the way, so the movie is already pushing its luck on multiple fronts before the romance, which raises a couple of questions of educational ethics that are completely ignored, even starts. Anna and Jamie keep bumping into each other, as she spends time with a group of friends who have their own little dramas that will be instantly resolved by the third act. Charlie (Harry Trevaldwyn) is her dormitory neighbor who plays it emotionally distant but wants to find the right guy, and Maggie (Esmé Kingdom) has a crush on Tom (Nikhil Parmar), who doesn't think of her in that way. That the screenplay makes room for all of that, too, means the central romance is pretty undercooked.

Anyway, Anna and Jamie do connect, deciding to keep their relationship casual and fun, and despite the warnings of his friend and possible other-woman Ceclia (Poppy Gilbert), Anna becomes emotionally invested in what mainly seems to be an argument-and-food-based relationship, apart from a single conversation that turns out to be more foreshadowing than anything else. That's when everything turns, because Jamie has a secret that would seem a bit difficult to hide and feels more than a bit cruel for so many people to keep from Anna.

To be fair, Carson and Mylchreest do have a little chemistry, although not enough to convince us of the initial romance and definitely not nearly enough to make the post-twist love story into what it needs to be. By the end of My Oxford Year, one might wonder if the entire project serves as an excuse for a little European vacation for its star. The movie is disposable and shallow enough for the case to be made, at least.

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