My Oxford year review: Me Before You, but Oxford

Netflix's latest original romance is predictable as ever.

You may have asked yourself when you saw My Oxford Year appear on your Netflix home screen, did we need another Netflix original romance film?

To be blunt, no, we did not.

My Oxford Year is a passable, good in moments, addition to the large category of tragic love stories. Think Me Before You but without Emilia Clarke’s irresistible charm and Sam Claffin’s devastating performance. And set in Oxford, obviously.

But where Me Before You makes me bawl my eyes out, My Oxford Year struggles to ]make my lip quiver.

Like most Netflix originals that need a love interest, it follows Sofia Carson’s Anna De La Vega, who, before taking a full-time job in America, makes the trip across the pond to spend a year in her dream location, Oxford. Each to their own, I guess.

She is smart, ambitious and a little too obsessed with books. I’m not one to judge, but she seems to have a much deeper relationship with them, which I don't want to know about.

Like most romance films, she is swept off her feet by a charming and mysterious Brit, Jamie (Corey Mylchreest). Unbeknownst to her, Jamie has a secret which throws their seemingly perfect future into the balance.

It follows the Me Before You formula to a tee. Find a man for our protagonist to fall in love with, find out he is dying and watch our protagonist do everything in her power to change his mind.

What My Oxford Year fails to realise is that the latter is such a gut punch because up until the very last minute, we believe that Claffin’s character will change his mind for Clarke’s. Whereas here, we find out that Jamie will be dying with 56 minutes left of the runtime, and he will not be changing his mind for anybody.

This could have worked, mind you. Last year's We Live In Time follows the ‘How can I enjoy the time I have left?’ structure to amazing effect. But without the powerhouse performances of Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh, it struggles to leave any lasting impression.

Not to say that Carson’s or Mylchreest’s performances are bad. They both have some great moments throughout, and you can buy their chemistry, but far too often, they are followed by clichés and one-note passages.

That goes for the film as a whole. There are moments which take you back by being genuinely quite good. Visually, there are some great shots scattered throughout and some humour which gave me a chuckle.

But it doesn’t take long before the painfully average writing brings you back to reality. This is still a generic Netflix original, and the good moments are more likely to be luck than a sign for things to come.

Surprisingly, what the film gets right to the tee is the representation of university life in England. Far too often, we have to deal with these depictions of a picturesque student life. Whereas in reality it is more chip vans, clubbing, a weird amount of Naked Attraction which you never bargained for and a little bit of studying here and there.

Which is to be expected since he wrote English folklore, The Imbertweeners. Consider my mind blown. I did not know I was in the presence of greatness when watching this film.

My Oxford Year as a film represents most of a student's life. It has its great moments. It has cringe moments, which make you want to peel your skin off. It has its bad moments where you reconsider your life goals. It has the boring moments, which nearly put you to sleep, and it has its brief, fleeting romances. 

It’s just an overall topsy-turvy and inconsistent time. Which works when you are trying to find yourself in your 20s, but not when you are trying to enjoy a film.