93 min | R | January 26, 2024 | Lionsgate
A student-teacher boundary thriller that thinks it is smarter than it is. Martin Freeman deserves better material.
Cairo Sweet is a wealthy, precocious high school student with literary ambitions. Jonathan Miller is her burned-out creative writing teacher. He assigns a provocative essay. She writes something that crosses a line. The line between mentorship and something else blurs. The premise has potential for a sharp examination of power dynamics, manipulation, and the way intelligence can be weaponized. The film squanders that potential by treating its own cleverness as a substitute for insight.
Jenna Ortega plays Cairo with performative sophistication that the script presents as genuine depth. She is a talented actress working with material that confuses purple prose with intelligence. Martin Freeman plays Miller with weary resignation that becomes passivity. The character needs to be more complicated than a man who fails to set boundaries. Freeman tries to find the complication. The script does not meet him there. Dagmara Dominczyk plays his wife with frustration that feels earned. Bashir Salahuddin provides the only grounded performance as a colleague who sees what is happening.
Jade Halley Bartlett writes and directs her first feature with a visual style that leans heavily on literary affectation. Characters quote Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. The dialogue is written to sound like writing rather than speech. The film wants to be a dark literary thriller about the erotic charge of words. It ends up being a cautionary tale that does not know whose side it is on or why that ambiguity matters.
The film is ninety-three minutes and still feels padded. The central relationship never generates the tension it needs because the script telegraphs every development. The ending arrives without earning its consequences. This is a first feature that announces its ambitions loudly and delivers on almost none of them.