Everything.

I have fulfilled the obligations for my degree at Oxford, and all that remains is the graduation ceremony. Although I’m no longer reading textbooks, I am as busy as I was during the academic term, since I’m filling up suitcases and attempting to sell my furniture. (Please email me immediately if you want to buy a blue-and-white couch.) Still, it was necessary to carve out time for an extremely important cultural event: I hosted a watch party of the new Netflix movie My Oxford Year with fellow students.

When the trailer was released earlier this summer, it was immediately clear that My Oxford Year is a low-brow, Hallmark-style tragic romantic comedy intended for emotional American women who consider themselves intelligent, sophisticated, and too refined for Hallmark. However, here on campus, My Oxford Year was quickly branded as satire from the trailer alone because the dialogue excerpts were insufferably trite and entirely unrealistic, so much so that I wondered if anyone who worked on the script had ever engaged in a single conversation, let alone a conversation with a British student at Oxford. “That is a serious bit of crumpet,” the annoying gay male best friend says of the attractive male teacher. Somewhat counterintuitively, students on campus concluded that My Oxford Year needed to be watched, even if only for laughs.

It is difficult to write a review because virtually everything about the movie — the acting, the script, the storyline — is terrible. To the extent there is a plot, it can be summarized as a crossover between the television show Emily in Paris and the movie/book The Fault in Our Stars, with an annoying narcissistic female lead who is like Meghan Markle in terms of style, eerie coldness, insincerity, and vapidness. (Indeed, My Oxford Year is from the same producers as The Fault in Our Stars.) Anna De La Vega, acted boringly by Sofia Carson, is an ambitious career woman attending Oxford University for a one-year master’s degree in English literature. She begins a casual fling with Jamie Davenport (played by Corey Mylchreest), a dashing British doctoral student who is also her professor. (While it is wholly plausible that a graduate student would suddenly assume the role to teach a seminar, as is the case in the movie, it is completely ridiculous that the grad student would arrive for the first class with cake, or be attractive.) Anna initially resents Jamie because he left her drenched when speeding past in a fancy car, and he appears to be a sleazy charmer. But at some indeterminate point during the movie, Anna and Jamie begin to like each other, and then we’re meant to believe that they fall in love. They never seem to have any substantive discussion together, however, and only playfully tease one another.

My Oxford Year is based on the book of the same title by Julia Whelan, who attended Oxford University as a visiting student for a year. But we have to wonder if Whelan, along with the movie’s production team, ever familiarized herself with the campus. Rather than strive for a modicum of accuracy, the camera crew just picked pretty backdrops, leading to rather confusing settings. We all wondered: Why are they having class in a dining hall? Why is there a party just outside a university chapel? And why is a ball held off campus grounds? Worst of all, there’s a steamy romantic scene in one of the university’s most famed libraries. As is the case with every movie or television show set in a university, the student has a ridiculously nice dormitory room, and the professor (in this case, technically a graduate student) has a lavish office.

The weirdest theme throughout the movie is that she’s super American and he’s super British, and we’re supposed to believe the American and British cultures are incompatible, even somewhat indecipherable to one another. (Certainly, Oxford and Cambridge University have different institutional designs and teaching methods from what is offered in the United States, but it does not take an American long to adapt to either the schooling or English culture more generally.) Anna’s first task upon arriving is to get fish and chips, because she’s American and she’s in England. For no apparent reason, Anna describes a particular bike as “so British.” After she declares it is her “birthday month,” Jamie responds that she’s “such an American.” Anna is very “blunt” — you know, because she’s American. I suppose that the bright-eyed American awkwardly adjusting to life abroad is a forgivable trope, but the unexplainable dynamic is that the British students conduct themselves as if Anna is the first American to attend Oxford University. Jamie asks Anna to read a poem on the first day in class, because it is written by an American, and Anna is American, so she can give it the proper “cadence.” The most unrealistic scene is not the student-professor romance nor the random fencing duel just outside of the Magdalen Chapel, but rather when a British student in a pub refers to Anna as “Miss Mexico” and “Miss Diversity” who is “here to make up the numbers” and is “taking the place of someone more deserving.” This would never happen, even if the hypothetical organization “Students Against DEI” were all wasted at the pub and the ritualistic hazing required bashing a minority.

The most frustrating aspect of My Oxford Year is not the flawed portrayal of the university, but rather the shallowness in what should be a richly intellectual environment. Anna’s “tutorials” — the Oxford term for one-on-one teaching sessions — are not about literature, as one would expect, but random opinions about the nature of life. Despite the fact that Anna supposedly graduated summa cum laude from Cornell, her stated reasons for wanting to attend Oxford University include that she has a “library fetish” and wants to sit “among those dusty old books and first editions,” thus prompting us to conclude that Cornell — along with every other higher education institution in the United States — just doesn’t have a decent library. (It is also worth noting that the books housed in Oxford’s libraries aren’t dusty.) Perhaps the single most cringeworthy moment was the professor’s delivering a pseudo-intellectual lecture, declaring unintelligibly that “poetry can be taught, but really, it should be tried.”

But putting aside all the misrepresentations of Oxford, the movie is dreadful because it is essentially two entirely different films mushed into one. About halfway into the movie, Anna becomes somewhat acclimated to Oxford and is close to returning home, but then an entirely different plot emerges. Jamie and Anna each struggle with a significant burden: He has a rare terminal “genetic” cancer that also killed his brother; she is Hispanic. Jamie, born to a stunningly wealthy family, is refusing further treatment against the wishes of his father, who has donated large sums toward finding a cure. Anna, born to immigrant Hispanic parents who we presume are in a somewhat low economic class because she has no “safety net,” has committed herself to becoming a corporate success story so that she can “make enough money to not have to worry about money.” Since he knows he’s in the last chapter of his life, Jamie has been sleeping around, because that’s what people do on their literal death bed. Jamie’s impulsiveness and frivolity inspire Anna to be a bit less uptight and abandon her rigid life plan, ultimately pursuing a career at Oxford and taking over his course.

Overall, My Oxford Year is awful, and that is apparent even to those lacking the insider knowledge on the university’s quirks and cultural dynamics. I will, however, offer a modicum of praise: By attempting to depict a professor-student romance in a positive light, especially with the professor being a straight white male, the movie is another herald of the end of the Me Too era. This minor cultural shift, however, is overshadowed by sinister messages, namely the promotion of exercising radical autonomy toward silly, fleeting pleasures, the devaluing of life through the romanticization of terminal illness, and the glorification of rejecting medical care that nearly amounts to assisted-suicide propaganda.