Jenna Ortega Leads Layered Teacher Drama

“I’m 18 and highly unremarkable.”

So starts “Miller’s Girl,” a drama-slash-psychological thriller that serves more so as an indictment of modern multilayered sexual politics than an (as marketed) after school special. As our lead character Cairo Sweet (Jenna Ortega) says, “longing” to experience something is the most dangerous force there is, and for Cairo, that longing culminates in a misguided crush and a politicized heartbreak with a professor (Martin Freeman).

High school student Cairo enrolls in a creative writing class taught by frustrated novelist Jonathan Miller (Freeman), who immediately takes a liking to her after spotting that she has a copies of both his debut novel and Henry Miller’s salacious works. Written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, “Miller’s Girl” plays on the titular Mr. Miller and the real-life author Miller himself, with Cairo’s compulsion to impress and find solace in her teacher further radicalized by taking on Miller’s prose in an ode to Mr. Miller himself.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is a story about an 18-year-old’s devastation, not her deception. Sure, Mr. Miller and Cairo comprise the ’90s-esque trope of a teacher-student drama, with the student setting out to ruin the life of her older male obsessee. But Cairo is arguably not a vindictive protégé; instead, she is merely a highly educated and emotionally immature girl, but a girl nonetheless.

The undercurrent…