Miller's Girl (2024)

Miller's Girl arrives with the bearing of a serious literary object: a Tennessee mansion, a stalled novelist turned teacher, a precocious student who has read everything and intends to weaponize it. Jade Halley Bartlett's debut wants the temperature of a humid Southern psychodrama and the erotics of a paperback left face-down on a nightstand. It delivers a young woman in a slip dress, a man in a cardigan, and a great deal of rain. The prose is quoted at length. The desire is announced early and often. The film is rarely boring, which is not the same as being good.

On the matter of contemporary social consciousness, the film keeps a sparse ledger. The cast is almost entirely white, and the lone supporting presence of color registers as staffing, not statement. Race never enters the conversation. Neither does the climate, the body, or the neural wiring of anyone involved. Class friction is real enough: Cairo's mansion against Miller's stalled career, a wife who outsells him, a school that measures worth in prestige. The film treats that friction as texture, a backdrop for seduction, not as an argument about who owns what. A feminist reading is available, since Cairo wields her intelligence and her sexuality with genuine calculation and refuses to be the victim of her own scheme. The film declines to make that reading for us.

The dialogue is bookish without being preachy. These characters quote poetry at each other and then do something unwise, which is a more honest use of literature than most films manage. Nobody stands at a lectern to explain the themes. The sermon never arrives. Instead we get a femme fatale with a Yale application, a teacher who should have known better, and a final scene that resolves nothing on purpose. It is a minor, chilly, faintly absurd picture, and it knows it. The tally is low, and the film has earned every point of it.