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Miller's Girl was released in theaters by Lionsgate on January 26, 2024. The film is not based on a book. It is a fictional thriller, written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett.
The movie features Jenna Ortega as Cairo Sweet and Martin Freeman as Jonathan Miller. The other cast members include Gideon Adlon as Winnie Black, Christine Adams as Joyce Manor, Elyssa Samsel as Suzette, Bashir Salahuddin as Boris Fillmore and Dogmara Dominczyk as Beatrice June Harker.
The events of this movie take place in Tennessee. Read on to know more about this movie.
What is the origin story of Miller's Girl?
Talking about Miller's Girl plot in a February 2024 interview, director Jade Bartlett told Forbes that she wanted to pen the story as a play. She thought of creating a villain's origin story.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I didn't write one villain, I wrote two,” Bartlett said.
However, she ended up writing a completely different narrative of the same genre, where she had two villains. Barrett was inspired by a murderous child's character named Rhoda Penmark from the novel Bad Seed written by William March. Rhoda was the protagonist as well as antagonist of the book.
Bartlett wanted to convey through her film that how a young woman can become immoral and vile.
“Sort of how I originated her [Cairo] was my internalized misogyny about what happens to women when men treat them poorly and that they become, you know, these sort of monster people,” Bartlett added.
However, things did not go as she had planned. While writing the character of Jonathan Miller (Cairo’s teacher), Bartlett realized that she had created two villains - Cairo Sweet and Jonathan Miller. Bartlett told Forbes:
“No one is a perfect villain or a perfect victim. They don't exist. These characters are quite nebulous and gray, which I think is closer to real-life people."
Cairo had an evil nature but she could have been stopped by the more mature man in the room, that is, her teacher Jonathan Miller. At the end of the movie, the former ultimately got humiliated by her teacher. Director Bartlett showed both sides of the story in the film and believed in painting a complicated picture when it came to characterization.
When asked if Bartlett had an origin story, she said that her ideas of a villainous story changed in her creative writing process. She further said that she now imagines an optimistic future for both her lead characters.
According to her imagination, Cairo would become a renowned writer and Mr Miller would start writing again. In the future, they both might meet at a book signing event and have a real adult conversation.
What is Miller's Girl all about?
In the movie Miller's Girl, Cairo is a student who lives alone and feels isolated. She begins writing to escape her loneliness. She gets admission to an English literature class, in which Mr. Miller teaches. She starts liking him and Mr Miller gets excited when he comes to know that Cairo has not only read every book in the syllabus, but his novel as well.
Cairo soon writes an essay about the dynamics of s*x in teacher-student affairs and this essay sparks intimacy. As a result, she soon starts hanging out with Mr. Miller, despite a significant age gap.
Jenna Ortega-starrer Miller's Girl is now available on Netflix for fans to watch.
