Capsule Reviews - 'Miller's Girl,' 'Scrambled'

by Philip Price

Miller's Girl

Photo: Lionsgate

I appreciate how deeply unserious writer/director Jade Halley Bartlett is with everything that makes up her feature debut, “Miller's Girl,” but a solid title screen and terrible Southern accents do not an erotic thriller make (I did like the title screen though, forreal). Admittedly, this does a really good job of playing up the tensions of its situation without getting too heady about itself while still existing within its schlocky genre confines - something last fall's “Fair Play” didn't balance as well. I don't know if this is necessarily the better film, but I certainly had more fun with “Miller's Girl.” Then again, I'm a sucker for FreeForm dramas aimed at teenagers that offer cheap thrills and trashy kicks. Like, I didn't watch the “Pretty Little Liars” spinoff series that ran on HBO Max, but I imagine this is exactly what that feels like.
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Shout out to Gideon Adlon for the Electric Six reference and Bashir Salahuddin for being a real stand-out. And while Jenna Ortega certainly seems to have an attraction to material about the "sexual anesthetization of a culture that's super-saturated with pornography and the inefficacy of romantic dogmas on young people's expectations" there is no inexorable attraction between Martin Freeman's charisma and this kind of material. So many of my man's line readings feel out of sync with what the character's thoughts and intentions should be. Or maybe I just can't stop picturing him without those hairy feet. While Freeman's Jonathan Miller may be characterized as too timid to ever actually go after or accomplish what he wants/desires, at least Bartlett shoots for the stars here, going so far as to have Ortega say words like, "Is this what it is to be an adult, the same exquisite longing of adolescence, but with the burden of constant accountability?" while also having Freeman and her film reach their climax simultaneously. Seriously, love the title card though. Font and all.

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Scrambled 

Photo: Lionsgate

Leah McKendrick, as both a performer and creator, seems to have a great mix of mainstream ideology that allows her to not paint herself as a target of criticism despite also feeling unique enough in her execution to make her both funny and memorable. It's not an (over) easy line to walk and while audiences probably won't leave “Scrambled” wanting to be like or be with McKendrick's character of Nellie Robinson, they will appreciate the journey largely due to McKendrick's ability to command tone both in her performance and the movie as a whole.
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An interesting testament to my generation's tendencies to delay the standard societal expectations much longer than in the past while simultaneously addressing the ties we still naturally feel to those traditions and expectations. Yes, it wraps everything up a little too neatly in the end especially considering we're supposed to buy that Clancy Brown had any semblance of an arc up until his last scene, but I appreciate the intent here - it has bigger ambitions than it might seem - and I appreciate the spotlight on what a suckfest it is for a woman to either be given injections or in the case of Nellie, inject themselves with hormones to stimulate healthy egg development among many other steps with the idea that one day they might fulfill what is a dream for some and a hope for others. It would have also been nice if Henry Zebrowski had a full circle moment here, but now I'm just trying to turn this into a rom-com when that's so clearly not the point of the film's intent that I like so much.