Jenna Ortega is rocketing up the Netflix Top 10 chart once again, but it’s not for the highly anticipated second season of Wednesday.
The streaming giant has just added Ortega’s newest movie Miller’s Girl, in which she plays a student entangled in a romantic relationship with her teacher (Martin Freeman). And it’s already at #4 on Netflix in the US today, in something of a repeat of how buzzy it was while it was still in theaters.
The word of mouth that Miller’s Girl enjoyed during its theatrical run, however, was largely due to an X-rated scene between Freeman’s professor and Ortega’s young writing student — and, likewise, to the fact that Ortega is 31 years younger than Freeman, who’s 52. In the film, the 21-year-old Ortega plays an even younger woman, an 18-year-old student named Cairo Sweet.
“It’s not saying, isn’t (an age-gapped romance) great,” Freeman said in an interview with Britain’s The Times. Stories about “difficult subjects,” he continued, can be “tainted by association. And that’s a shame. Are we gonna have a go at Liam Neeson for being in a film about the Holocaust?”
The cynic in me suspects that, now that Miller’s Girl is on Netflix, anyone who watches is basically going to give their fast forward button a workout so they can jump to “that” scene. Otherwise, the movie is just not very good; it’s got a 5.2/10 on IMDb, for example, as well as an abysmal 29% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Given Ortega’s high profile on Netflix thanks to Wednesday — the new season of which will likely arrive in 2025 — I wouldn’t be surprised if more people decide to give Miller’s Girl a chance on the basis of Ortega’s name alone. Maybe even enough people that it pushes the movie a little higher on Netflix’s daily Top 10 ranking, although the movie has zero chance of dislodging the streamer’s current reigning champ, Sydney Sweeney’s Anyone But You.
If you ask me, though, I’d recommend skipping Miller’s Girl entirely. It’s always a bit of a red flag when the one thing a movie is known for is a controversial sex scene. Viewers, aghast at what they’d seen, flocked to Twitter and TikTok earlier this year to express their shock at the raunchy scene, while the only other thing you really hear about this movie is how bad it is. A definite skip.
