A series of dreaming clichés

I’m 80 per cent certain that Netflix’s new film,

My Oxford Year, is rage bait. So why am I stuck inside reviewing it, instead of enjoying this glorious summer’s day?

Reader, I did My Oxford Year in real life. The film’s protagonist, American student Anna De La Vega, comes to Oxford to do a postgraduate degree in Victorian poetry; I first moved here to do MSt in eighteenth-century literature. She’s from an immigrant family; so am I. She has a penchant for romancing Barbour-jacket-wearing DPhil students in old libraries; so did I (well, just the one DPhil student — hello to my husband if you’re reading this!). I should have loved the film: I know first-hand how enchanting Evelyn Waugh’s “city of aquatint” can be.

No, what irritated me to no end about My Oxford Year is not the sentimental sepia patina worthy of your deepest dark academia dreams. It’s that it is trend-obsessed pastiche.

You’d be forgiven for wondering whether Netflix ran its algorithm magic and asked AI to write a script with all the trends

Pastiche is always in danger of coming across cringeworthy, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. Netflix itself has done that to some degree of success with Stranger Things, which weaves very recognisable stylistic elements of 80s pop culture into mostly original material. But it only works if there is some level of consistency in tone, and My Oxford Year lacks that entirely. You’d be forgiven for wondering whether Netflix ran its algorithm magic and asked AI to write a script with all the trends. Strong independent woman meets brooding rich boy? Check. Bridgerton allusions? Check. Sassy gay best friend? Check. Emily in Paris style montages of a young American woman swept off her feet by the beauty of European architecture? You bet. 

And it gets worse. The film sets up the forbidden student-teacher romance trope, but does nothing with it. In real life, Jamie Davenport, a DPhil student covering classes for his supervisor, would get into serious trouble with HR for dating Anna, his tutorial student. But in the fantastical reality of My Oxford Year, it’s a power dynamic that’s introduced to no effect at all to the plot. They get to snog in plain sight by the Magdalen College deer park without a care in the world. 

Similarly, when Anna finally gets taken by her heartthrob Jamie to see his family’s stately home, she recreates the scene in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth Bennet is shocked by the grandeur of Mr. Darcy’s Pemberley estate. But is there any of the class commentary that makes Jane Austen’s novel such a complex and insightful read? Of course not. And the cherry on top of the cake? (Beware of spoilers, gentle reader!) Jamie, the witty-but-withdrawn love interest, has a rare genetic disease which means he’ll have to be killed off by the end of the film to enable Anna’s character growth. I wish I was joking. My Oxford Year does share the same production company, Temple Hill Entertainment, with the 2014 teen-cancer-tearjerker The Fault in Our Stars. Encouraged, perhaps, by the wave of terminal illness love stories that sprouted up in the 2010s, Jamie is condemned to die to add a bit of gravitas to an otherwise boneless script. This storyline is introduced so awkwardly and brought to its painful end so melodramatically that it has an unintended comical effect instead. When Jamie is found by Anna apparently dead in the morning after a night of passion, I couldn’t help bursting out laughing. Did she ride him to death? 

There are, of course, a number of irksome details that made me roll my eyes. Anna is meant to be studying for an MA, which should really be an MSt. Anna and Jamie go to a college summer ball inexplicably attended by elderly ladies. And far worse, Jamie’s remark in his opening seminar with Anna that “Poetry can be taught, but really it should be live” belongs on a fridge magnet rather than an Oxford literature seminar. No Brit I have ever met would be caught dead saying something that saccharine. 

But none of these things would matter that much, if My Oxford Year were an old-fashioned feel-good rom-com. If it were, I’d even welcome some of its silliness as charming. Instead, it’s everything that is bad with the current TikTokification of literature. If you’re not familiar with this, Zoomers have flooded TikTok with short videos suggesting what book to read next based on your trope preferences. Do you like romantasy enemies-to-lovers stories? Read Sarah J. Maas. Will-they-won’t-they class divide novels? Read Sally Rooney. My Oxford Year is that but in film form. It’s a dark academia, Y2K rom-com meets Pride-and-Prejudice-knock-off with a sprinkling of terminal illness teen-drama. It’s tangible proof that technology has drastically and perhaps permanently changed the way we consume art. Storytelling has become micro-trendified. I wonder if there is any coming back from it.