My Oxford Year (A PopEntertainment.com Movie Review)

PopEntertainment
Aug 2
3 min read

MY OXFORD YEAR (2025)

Starring Sofia Carson, Corey Mylchreest, Dougray Scott, Catherine McCormack, Harry Trevaldwyn, Hugh Coles, Poppy Gilbert, Barney Harris, Esmé Kingdom, Nikhil Parmar, Romina Cocca, Yadier Fernández, Nia Anisah, Barunka O'Shaughnessy, Abdul Sessay, Rebecca Burton, Marty Cruickshank, Michael Begley, Martin Bishop, Michael Murray and Riz Khan.

Screenplay by Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne.

Directed by Iain Morris.

Distributed by Netflix. 113 minutes. Rated PG-13.

In the past six months, this is the second sappy but sweet romantic comedy/drama which Sofia Carson has made for Netflix.

Much like The Life List – which just came out in March – in My Oxford Year, Carson plays a beautiful and brilliant upper-middle-class woman who was an English major but has sold out her beliefs by taking a corporate job. However, she comes to learn who she really is by moving to a big city for a year. While there, she falls for a guy with a British accent and has to learn the important lessons about love, friendship, learning and dealing with death before she finds true happiness.

In My Oxford Year the city is London, compared to The Life List’s Brooklyn, but otherwise these two films seem to follow a bit of a formula.

Perhaps the streaming network is trying to turn Carson into their go-to chick-flick star – sort of like Lacey Chabert, Danica McKellar or Jessy Schram are to the Hallmark Channel, or Vivica A. Fox is for Lifetime.

Because My Oxford Year is very much like a Hallmark Channel or Lifetime movie – and I mean that in both the very best and very worst ways. It’s sweet and charming in parts, a bit sappy and maudlin in other parts. In fact, this film specifically goes from a nicely amiable comic love story in the first half until, suddenly, it takes a much darker turn.

As one character notes, “It’s like watching a slow-motion car crash.”

Carson plays a young bibliophile named Anna (she literally gets turned on by the smell of old books) who decides to splurge and spend a year studying at Oxford before settling into a good-but-non-glamourous financial job with Goldman Sachs. She goes specifically to study Victorian poetry under literature Professor Styan (Barunka O’Shaughnessy) who she has long idolized, but, oops… right when she gets to London the professor is promoted to department head and cannot teach the class.

Soon after she gets settled in, she meets a handsome but kind of cheeky local playboy, Jamie (Corey Mylchreest). They hate each other so immediately that you know it is only a matter of time before they fall in love. After all, he splashed her with his flashy vintage sports car (an 1960s Jaguar E Type, arguably one of the most beautiful autos ever), then she witnesses him ghosting an ex-girlfriend in the local chip shop. What’s not to like? And – irony alert (well at least unrealistic coincidence alert) – he is the teaching assistant that is taking over her poetry class.

They get on each other’s nerves – until they don’t. They start spending more time together, getting to know each other and getting closer and closer. However, they agree to just make it a fun fling, with no strings attached, because she will only be there for the year. Honestly, this seems to be a strange character choice for Anna, who is obviously a huge romantic and doesn’t seem the type to settle for zipless sex.

Of course, things start getting more and more serious. However, fate has a surprise in store for Anna, and she learns why Jamie has been holding her at arm’s length. So, she has to come to a decision, does she break things off from Jamie, or put her own life on hold in an effort to save him?

What had for an hour been a slightly unbelievable but still nice romantic comedy suddenly becomes much, much darker. While it’s not completely unexpected – this is a film version of a romantic novel, after all – it turns the film into something much less pleasurable.

Jay S. Jacobs