My Oxford Year (2025)

My Oxford Year arrives on Netflix with the quiet confidence of a film that knows exactly which demographic it intends to serve and has no intention of surprising them. An ambitious American named Anna De La Vega travels to Oxford to study Victorian poetry, is splashed by a vintage Jaguar, and falls for the charming instructor hiding a genetic cancer diagnosis. The film then proceeds through well-worn parts: the pub, the ball, the stately home, the collapsed model car. The critics were unkind. The audience was not. It became one of Netflix's most-watched films of all time, which tells us something about the appetite for this sort of thing, and nothing about its quality.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is a temperate specimen. Sofia Carson, a Latina actress, headlines as the American lead, and the supporting cast is modestly multiethnic, though the screenplay never troubles itself to remark on any of it. Anna's ambition, her New York job, her eventual choice about whether to stay in England, provide a light framework of female autonomy, the kind that has been standard in romantic comedies since the 1990s. Beyond that, the cupboard is bare. There is no engagement with race as subject matter, no queer presence, no environmental anxiety, no critique of the money that furnishes the Jaguars and the ancestral homes. The film regards wealth as scenery.

The messaging, such as it is, amounts to a gentle instruction not to suffer alone and to make the most of the time remaining, delivered with the soft focus of a greeting card. This is sentiment, not sermon. A scholar at Oxford has objected to the film's mishandling of matriculation, the Master of Arts, and the Latin, which is a more rigorous standard of accuracy than the production ever aspired to. The result is a pleasant, inert object, gorgeous to photograph and empty of argument. It asks nothing of the viewer and offers nothing to argue with. We classify it, then, as a romance of low cultural ambition and lower ideological content, which is, in its own way, a kind of honesty.