I expected more from My Oxford Year. The film wants to be a light romantic comedy and a tragic love story, but struggles to connect the two. Anna, an ambitious American spending a year studying in Oxford, meets charming tutor Jamie. An attractive setting and an inevitable flirtation are ready; convincing emotional intimacy is less forthcoming.
The opening stretch has some charm. Oxford looks immaculate, with handsome old buildings, libraries and autumnal light. Friends and housemates add a little colour, and the conversations are pleasant enough. Yet the romance feels more like warm broth than a fire. We understand why these two are supposed to become a couple without really feeling it.
Shared meals, night-time walks and meaningful looks supply the expected ingredients. They do not establish much depth. That matters when the film makes its heavier turn: a dramatic change of tone needs a relationship strong enough to support it, and this one has not earned the force of what follows.
The later emphasis on loss, life choices and family wounds remains disappointingly superficial. Slow motion, sad music and emotionally loaded gestures are familiar tools, but they cannot create the foundations the earlier scenes omitted. The film signals how moving it intends to be rather than allowing that feeling to develop.
Sofia Carson is competent but often too smooth as Anna. Corey Mylchreest has charm, though his performance becomes rather controlled when the material calls for greater vulnerability. The constant visual polish creates a similar problem. Oxford is beautiful; the experience increasingly resembles tourism, with too little uncertainty or imperfection.
There are agreeable moments, but the heartbreak never reaches the depth the film wants. Viewers after light romance with a touch of sadness may find enough here. I wanted a stronger sense of real closeness and loss. My Oxford Year tells us it has a moving story, then keeps too much of that story at a comfortable distance.