There is a certain kind of romance that blooms the moment a suitcase snaps shut and a passport slips into your pocket. Travel can feel like a promise made to yourself. You go out into the world and it answers back. Streets you have never walked before become your own for a day. You look up at a cathedral ceiling and wonder how many others stood in that same spot in awe. You try food that does not remind you of home and you find that you like it. In that mind set, love often appears like a companion standing just around the corner. Cinema has always known this. The screen has given us so many lovers at large. Audrey Hepburn gliding through Rome. Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi longing under Venetian light. Two strangers trading words all night as Vienna wakes around them. Even the goofy charm of a whirlwind Italian fantasy where fate seems to turn every corner with a wink. These stories make travel feel like an open gate. You step through, and your heart follows.
With that longing in mind, it is easy to see why a story set among ancient quadrangles and spires might feel like a sure thing. Oxford is the stuff of daydreams to many of us. Libraries that smell like paper and time. Stone walkways damp from early rain. Students hurrying to tutorials with poems still swimming in their heads. My Oxford Year sets itself up to be one of those sweet escapes. A young woman pauses her career to study poetry. She boards a plane. She ends up in a place where history lingers in every doorway. Surely a romance waits for her between the stacks and under the lamps that line the old streets.
The film comes from director Iain Morris, best known for a very different brand of comedy, and it follows Anna de la Vega, played by Sofia Carson. Anna is ambitious and a little starstruck by the place she has landed. She puts aside a well paid job back in the States to spend a year reading Victorian verse. She is quick, curious, and determined to make the most of her time. Within days she manages to take a wrong turn into local politics and nearly introduces herself to someone she wishes she had not. That someone is Jamie Davenport, played by Corey Mylchreest, a handsome young academic who moves through this town like he grew up on these streets. They clash in a way that feels almost staged by the city itself, like the place decided to throw them into each other’s path for sport.
There is a twist on their early rivalry. The man who ruffles Anna at first meeting turns out to be the one guiding her studies. He is her instructor for the term. It is a familiar twist in classroom romances on screen, though here it is less about power and more about banter and chemistry. The two trade barbs. They try to hold their ground. A smile sneaks in where a sharp word was meant to land. Then the weather changes. The long light of late summer turns to the darker glow of autumn and their anger cools into something more reckless. They kiss, they try to keep boundaries that do not hold up, and they slide into an affair that both insist is only for now. No promises, they tell each other. Just the year.
But the year is the point. A finite clock is part of the charm and part of the danger. Jamie is the sort who can soften anyone’s resolve. He uses poetry like a language he grew up speaking, not in an academic way, but in a way that feels like someone lighting a candle for the right mood. At one point he gives Anna a first edition of Edna St Vincent Millay, and that little act says a lot about what kind of film this wants to be. The gesture is old fashioned on purpose. A whisper from a different era. You can see why Anna would be tempted to let herself believe in something that cannot last.
Complications swirl around them. There is a woman named Cecelia who keeps appearing at events with Jamie. She seems very at home in the world he inhabits. Anna cannot help counting the times she sees them together. The story wants the audience to share that unsettled feeling, to wonder if the rules of their arrangement mean there is always someone else waiting off stage. Meanwhile, Anna’s life back in the United States hums like a machine that wants her to return and keep it running. There is pressure from family, especially her mother, who has a clear picture of what success should look like. Anna is torn in ways that feel familiar to anyone who has tried to follow a passion when money and duty tug at their sleeve.
The script is based on the novel by Julia Whelan, and it credits Allison Burnett and Melissa Osborne alongside the director for shaping the story for the screen. The result lands closer to a light young adult romance than to the kind of aching travel romance many may be hoping for. That is not a terrible thing in itself. Some viewers go to movies like this to feel cozy and amused. For them, there are pieces that will satisfy. The trouble is the world around Anna feels a little thin. Oxford is filmed beautifully in moments, but the life of the place is not fully alive in the story. Her classes, her peers, the act of studying poetry in a city so steeped in it, all of that feels sketched in rather than lived in.
The supporting characters also lean toward types. Anna’s closest friend in the program is witty and supportive, always ready with a clever remark to keep things moving. There is a sweet fellow student who cannot see what is right in front of him. The kind of blind crush subplot that pops up often and behaves exactly the same wherever it appears. There are friends at the pub who exist to push a conversation along or deliver a punchline. It is not that any of them are unbearable. They are just familiar to the point where you can sometimes say their lines a breath before they do.
Even with those limits, the film brushes up against an interesting idea. Anna is a first generation American striver who has learned to value concrete victories. Her mother thinks in numbers, job titles, and stability. Anna begins to think in lines of verse and in moments that glow and then pass. That tension could have given the film more weight. The conflict between a family’s reasonable dreams and an individual’s desire to pursue art and love is real and painful. We get flashes of it. A conversation that goes wrong. A moment where Anna’s smile falls when she hears her mother talk about money. Then the film hurries back to safer ground. It feels like the deeper version of this story waits in the wings and never gets called onto the stage.
There is another reason the movie does not stay the airy escape it promises at first. This is where a viewer should decide how much they want to know before they sit down. If you prefer to be surprised, you may want to stop here. For those who want the full picture, the change happens halfway through. The secrecy that swirls around Jamie does not come from a casual approach to their agreement. He is not just seeing someone else on the side. He has been living with a rare cancer diagnosis, and the forecast is not good. He has chosen to keep it quiet and to control the story of his life the limited way he can. When Anna finds out, the movie shifts from wistful to mournful.
That turn is not unheard of in romance. Many old favorites walk a path from joy to sorrow and find meaning somewhere in between. Here, though, the change of tone has a flattening effect. The earlier playfulness and the travel glow darken, and the story starts to resemble an older classic where one lover is altered forever while the other faces a health crisis that steals what might have been. It is not that the subject should be out of bounds. Far from it. Illness is part of life and great love stories have included it with care. The problem is that the movie has not built up the emotional foundation to carry the weight it suddenly tries to bear.
Sofia Carson and Corey Mylchreest are appealing performers. They look good together. They have moments where a smile lands at the right time and where a shared joke makes you believe in a private world between them. When the script asks for deeper feeling, though, the current does not run as strong as it needs to. They do not reach the level of magnetism that some other pairs achieved in similar tales. Think about those two wanderers in Vienna, talking until the street cleaners came, the world held at bay by the flicker of their conversation. Or think about the way Katharine Hepburn and Rossano Brazzi look at each other in Venice, both knowing that their love may be true and impossible at once. Even the fizzy charm of a comic crush that comes alive in Italy can give you a lightning bolt jolt when the right two stars meet. Here, the charge is lighter. When the mood turns somber, that lighter charge becomes a problem. The sorrow does not have enough earlier joy to push against.
All of this makes My Oxford Year sound harsher than it is to watch. There are bright spots throughout. The city still glows in many shots. The camera loves water on stone and sunlight slanting across old windows. There are jokes about language and culture that are breezy and gently funny, the kind of humor that comes from noticing how people in one place think and speak compared to another. The score is pleasant and does not smother the scenes. The editing keeps things moving in a way that will not lose an audience looking for a comfortable night out. You can imagine this playing in a dorm common room on a rainy weekend and making the afternoon warmer.
What stays frustrating is the sense of waste. A romance set at Oxford could have drawn more on the space itself. Imagine the lovers slipping into a reading room after closing to whisper lines to each other, or getting lost on a path by a college garden when fog rolls in, or trading notes about poems that matter to them with real passion. The film gestures at these possibilities. It never quite takes the time to let them bloom. It uses poetry as ornament more than lifeblood. Anna is a serious student in name, but the writing does not give her the kind of language that would make you feel that study has changed her. Her essays and her arguments are told to us rather than shown. For a story about people who live with words, the words on screen are a bit too easy.
The story also brushes past the tricky ethics of a teacher and student relationship. It tries to soften the issue by making Jamie a graduate instructor and by keeping the power imbalance low on its list of concerns. Even so, there is a lot to unpack in that dynamic. Trust, responsibility, and the way an academic environment shapes intimacy. The movie prefers to present the pairing as a spicy obstacle rather than a serious thread. Some viewers will accept that choice with a shrug. Others might wish for a little more self awareness.
On the adaptation front, those who read Julia Whelan’s book may walk into the theater with their own set of expectations. The process of taking a novel and compressing it into a couple of hours is always painful. Subplots get shaved down. Interior thoughts need to be turned into action or dialogue. In this case, you can feel where the richer layers of the original might have been trimmed. Anna’s interior life, her academic growth, and the slow deepening of her relationships are the kind of things that books can build like a cathedral, one stone at a time. The movie has fewer stones to work with and settles for an attractive facade.
The illness storyline raises another point worth mentioning. When movies bring cancer into a romance, they run the risk of turning real suffering into a device. Viewers have seen this before, and many have personal experiences that make these moments land hard. The best versions handle the subject with care and give the character with the diagnosis an inner life and agency that stands on its own. Here, the reveal arrives like a lever that shifts the story onto a new track. Jamie becomes a person with a disease, and while the film tries to give him dignity and wit, it also uses his condition as a way to steer Anna’s arc. That choice can feel a little programed, a little grimly inevitable. It is moving in places, but it can also feel like the game was fixed the whole time.
Even so, there are feelings to be felt here. The movie speaks to the idea that love can change the course of a life even if it does not last. Anna must choose between a plan that was meant to secure her future and a path that asks her to accept risk and heartbreak. The pressure from family, the lure of a safe salary, the fear that art will not support a person in this world, all of that rings true. I wish the film dug deeper into those veins. Had it done so, it might have found a way to carry its sadder notes without smothering the joy that drew us in.
When the credits roll, you may find yourself thinking of travel again. Not in the way of My Oxford Year, but in your own way. Of the time you spent a week in a new city and felt like a different version of yourself, or the weekend you thought a person you had just met might change everything. The movie has that pull, even if it cannot hold it. You might end up wanting to look up at old buildings and wonder who loved who there once. You might decide to walk to the library and pick up a book of poems, just to see what someone else felt a hundred years ago.
As a whole, My Oxford Year feels like a glossy brochure for a study abroad program. It is pretty, friendly, and full of promises it cannot quite keep. The leads are attractive and likable, but the spark that would make your heart skip is missing. The dialogue often sounds simpler than it should for characters who live with literature. Some scenes charm, some side characters ease the mood, and a handful of jokes about the gap between British and American manners land well. But after the midway reveal, the story narrows. The possibilities that make travel romances intoxicating begin to fall away, one by one, until the path to the ending looks straight and short. The film arrives there out of breath, having left behind the very thing that made the trip worth taking.
In the end, I wanted more. More life in the classrooms. More time in the stacks and pubs and gardens. More heat between the lovers. More bravery with the themes it raises. Less timidness with language. Less reliance on a twist to do the heavy lifting. I did not hate the movie. I just felt it had a better one inside it, one that glanced out at me from time to time and then ducked back out of sight. If you go in search of an easy evening, you may find enough to lean back and enjoy. If you hoped for a new favorite travel romance to sit beside those old companions you love, you may come away with a sigh and a wish.
