Netflix's "My Oxford Year" had everything going for it: a beloved book, gorgeous Oxford setting, and a tragic love story that made readers sob. So why are fans calling it one of 2025's biggest disappointment? The answer involves Sofia Carson speaking like she's trying to seduce someone, a teacher-student romance, and an ending that completely betrays the book's hopeful message. If you're wondering whether to watch this or just read Julia Whelan's novel instead, here's everything that went wrong with what should have been Netflix's next big romantic hit.
The Story
The movie follows Anna De La Vega, played by Sofia Carson, who's an American student from a Hispanic family. She's super smart – she graduated from Cornell University with top grades and even got a job offer from Goldman Sachs (which the movie mentions about a million times). But instead of taking the job, she decides to defer it for a year to study Victorian poetry at Oxford University in England, which has always been her dream.
On Anna's very first day at Oxford, she gets splashed by water when Jamie Davenport, played by Corey Mylchreest, drives by in his fancy sports car. She's annoyed, but then finds out that this same guy will be teaching one of her classes. Jamie isn't actually a professor – he's a doctoral student who also works as a teaching assistant, kind of like how graduate students sometimes teach classes in American universities.
At first, Anna and Jamie don't like each other and make sarcastic comments back and forth. But then they spend a night together going to a pub (Anna's first time in a British pub), and they start to get along. However, at the end of the night, Jamie acts cold and seems to reject her, which makes Anna feel embarrassed and angry. To make him jealous, she decides to dance with another guy.
The next day, Jamie shows Anna a special poetry book and they make up. They start getting romantic and decide to keep things casual and fun. Anna also talks to Cecilia, who is Jamie's close friend and warns Anna to stay away from him. Over the next few months, Anna and Jamie become closer and closer, and finally Jamie invites Anna to his apartment.
This is where the movie gets more serious. Jamie tells Anna that his older brother Eddie died, and because of this, he doesn't talk to his father anymore. Their relationship is really strained and sad. But the next morning after telling Anna this, Jamie starts acting distant and weird again.
Anna goes to the Oxford vs Cambridge boat race in London with her new friends from university. She hasn't seen Jamie for a whole week because he says he's been studying at the library. But then Anna finds out that Jamie hasn't actually been at the library at all, and Cecilia has also been missing for a week. This makes Anna suspicious and angry.
Anna decides to go to Jamie's apartment to confront him about lying to her. When she gets there, she finds Jamie and Cecilia together, and Jamie looks really sick. He's receiving some kind of medical treatment. Jamie gets angry and yells at Anna to leave. Anna is confused and hurt because she doesn't understand what's happening.
Later, Jamie finally tells Anna the truth, and it's heartbreaking. Cecilia was actually his brother Eddie's girlfriend before Eddie died. Eddie died from a very aggressive type of cancer that runs in families – meaning it's genetic and can be passed down from parents to children. Now Jamie has the same cancer that killed his brother. What Anna saw when she walked in was Jamie getting his last cancer treatment. He decided to stop the treatments because they're too painful, which is why his father is angry with him. His father wants him to keep fighting the cancer, but Jamie doesn't want to suffer anymore.
Jamie tells Anna that she shouldn't waste her time on him because he's going to die. But Anna remembers a conversation they had earlier where she told him that no one should have to suffer alone. She decides she wants to stay with him and help him through this difficult time.
Jamie agrees to take Anna to a fancy university ball where she meets his parents. Jamie's father talks to Anna privately and asks her to convince Jamie to come home so he can get the best possible medical treatment. But Jamie is still stubborn and doesn't want to do it. At the end of the night, Jamie becomes very weak and collapses at home. He has to go to the hospital to recover, and Anna sees his father outside looking very upset and worried.
For Anna's birthday, she drives Jamie's car to visit the huge, beautiful castle where he grew up. When she gets there, her friends surprise her with a birthday party. Jamie is still avoiding his father, even though his father keeps talking about new experimental drugs that might help. But Jamie says he doesn't want to spend whatever time he has left stuck in a hospital. During the birthday visit, Jamie tells Anna that his brother Eddie actually died at this same castle.
After Anna opens her birthday presents, she finds Jamie and his father working together to build a model car that she gave Jamie as a gift. This is the same kind of model cars that Jamie and Eddie used to build together when they were little boys. It's a sweet moment showing that Jamie and his father are starting to fix their relationship. Anna's friends also find out about Jamie's cancer, and Anna tells Jamie that she loves him.
When Anna gets a phone call from her parents wishing her happy birthday, she tells her mother that she's decided to stay in England instead of going back to New York to take her Goldman Sachs job. This makes Jamie really angry because he thinks Anna is ruining her future for him. They have a big fight about it, and Anna has to sleep in a different room. Jamie gets so upset that he smashes the model car that he and his father were working on together.
After their fight, Anna decides that maybe Jamie is right and she should go back to America since he doesn't want her to stay. She graduates from Oxford, and she and Jamie don't talk to each other for a while. But eventually they do talk again. Anna still wants to stay with Jamie, and even though Jamie is scared that Anna will regret giving up her career for him, they decide to get back together and spend the night together.
The next morning is the saddest part of the movie. Anna wakes up and finds Jamie unconscious and not responding. They rush him to the hospital, where a doctor tells them that Jamie has developed a very serious case of pneumonia. Because the cancer has made his immune system so weak, his body can't fight off the pneumonia, and he needs immediate medical treatment to survive. But Jamie's father, understanding that this is what Jamie wants, decides to respect his son's wishes and refuses the treatment.
Before Jamie dies, he and Anna have a beautiful dream sequence where they imagine traveling around Europe together, visiting all the places they had planned to see. Jamie dies peacefully in Anna's arms.
The movie then jumps forward in time to show us what happened after Jamie died. Anna did end up traveling around Europe alone, visiting all the places she and Jamie had dreamed of seeing together. Eventually, she becomes a teacher and gets the exact same job that Jamie had – teaching Victorian poetry at Oxford. In her very first class, she brings the same type of cake that Jamie used to bring to his students, showing that she's carrying on his memory and traditions.
My Review
Watching "My Oxford Year" was honestly a frustrating experience, and I can understand why so many people have criticized it. While the movie has some beautiful moments and the idea behind the story is touching, there are so many problems that it's hard to enjoy.
The biggest Issue for me was Sofia Carson's performance as Anna. Throughout the entire movie, she seemed stiff and unnatural. Instead of acting like a real person, she constantly tried to sound seductive with this weird, breathy voice that didn't fit most of the scenes. Even when she was supposed to be having normal conversations with friends or classmates, she sounded like she was trying to be mysterious and sexy. It was really distracting and made it hard to believe she was actually a graduate student who loved poetry.
Anna also didn't seem excited about being at Oxford, which was supposed to be her dream. For someone who gave up a high paying job to study Victorian poetry at one of the world's most famous universities, she acted bored and emotionless most of the time. I never felt like she actually loved literature or was passionate about learning. Instead, she seemed like she was just going through the scenes.
The friend group in the movie was also really unrealistic. Anna immediately becomes best friends with a group of students, but we never really see how these friendships develop. They just suddenly exist, and all these people do is talk about Anna and Jamie's relationship and give Anna expensive gifts for no clear reason. In real life, graduate students at competitive programs like Oxford would probably be more focused on their own studies and wouldn't have time to constantly discuss one person's love life.
Corey Mylchreest, who plays Jamie, does a better job acting than Sofia Carson, but his character also has problems. He's supposed to be this deep, intellectual guy because he studies Victorian poetry, but sometimes his "everything is meaningful and poetic" attitude feels over the top. However, I could forgive this because his character is dealing with terminal cancer, which would definitely make someone think deeply about life and death.
The movie's biggest problem, though, is how it handles the relationship between a student and her teacher. Even though Jamie is technically a graduate student and not a full professor, he still has power over Anna because he teaches her class and grades her work. The movie tries to make their relationship seem romantic and sweet, but in real life, this kind of situation can be really harmful to students. There are many cases where teachers and professors have taken advantage of students who trusted them. The movie completely ignores how problematic this power dynamic is.
When Jamie first kisses Anna and then walks away, I thought maybe the movie would explore why this relationship was complicated and wrong. But instead, the only reason Jamie was hesitant was because he had cancer, not because he was her teacher. The movie never addresses the ethical problems with their relationship.
The cancer storyline Itself feels unrealistic. Jamie supposedly has this aggressive, genetic cancer and is getting serious treatments, but except for one scene where Anna finds him getting treatment, he looks perfectly healthy throughout the entire movie. He never seems tired, sick, or weak until the very end when he suddenly collapses. Real cancer patients going through treatment usually show many more symptoms and side effects.
The movie also has pacing problems. Important events happen too quickly without enough development, and some storylines are dropped without being resolved. The dialogue often sounds fake – people don't talk the way the characters in this movie talk. Many of the lines sound like they were written to sound clever or deep, but instead they come across as pretentious.
One of the most unrealistic parts was that Anna, who claims to be from Queens, New York, doesn't know what a gyro is and acts disgusted by food trucks. Anyone who actually grew up in Queens would be very familiar with gyros and street food, since there are food trucks and Greek restaurants everywhere in New York.
The ending, where Anna becomes a teacher and takes over Jamie's exact job, felt strange to me. Instead of honoring Jamie's memory while still being her own person, Anna basically becomes a copy of him. She teaches the same classes, brings the same cake to students, and seems to have given up her own identity. It doesn't feel like she's integrating his memory into her life – it feels like she's just continuing his life for him.
Movie vs Book Differences
It's clear that the Netflix adaptation changes a lot, sometimes in ways that completely reshape the tone and meaning of the story. In the book, the main character is Ella Durran, a 24 year old Rhodes Scholar from Ohio who dreams of working in politics. She's smart, funny, and deeply committed to making a difference in Washington. The movie renames her Anna De La Vega and makes her a New Yorker aiming for a career in finance at Goldman Sachs. This change in name, career, and background alters how we see her ambitions and even how she fits into the Oxford setting.
The movie also cuts down and changes many side stories from the book. In the novel, the supporting characters like Ella's friends at Oxford, Jamie's family, and people from her past have depth and their own arcs. They aren't just background characters, they help shape Ella's choices and give the romance extra weight. In the film, some of these characters are removed or rewritten, and their roles are simplified. For example, Jamie's deceased brother Oliver in the book becomes Eddie in the movie, and Cecelia, who had a big emotional role in the book as Oliver's fiancée, is reduced to a smaller part as Jamie's ex-girlfriend.
The way the romance develops is another major difference. In the book, Ella and Jamie's relationship grows slowly and naturally, with lots of conversations, shared moments, and quiet intimacy. You see why they fall for each other. The movie moves much faster, jumping between big romantic or dramatic scenes without as much time spent on the small, bonding moments. Even key plot points change like how Ella learns about Jamie's illness. In the book, she pieces it together herself over time, which makes it more personal and emotional.
This change in pacing affects how the main character comes across. Book-Ella has warmth, humor, stubbornness, and real emotional highs and lows, making her feel relatable and human. Many readers felt that Sofia Carson's Anna, while still likable, came across as a bit more polished and less layered. The book's Ella reacts to challenges in ways that feel raw and authentic, while the film's version sometimes softens or shortens those reactions.
Even the romantic setting is altered in tone. In the novel, special moments like the punting trip on the river are deeply personal, just Ella and Jamie, building their connection. In the movie, this becomes a group outing, which changes the intimacy of the scene. The adaptation also adds new group-friends scenes that weren't in the book, giving Anna a bigger social circle but pulling some focus away from the romance.
The ending is one of the biggest changes. In the book, Jamie survives thanks to a clinical trial, and he and Ella go on their planned European trip together. The story ends on a bittersweet but hopeful note, there's no guarantee of a happily ever after, but life goes on with love and possibility. In the movie, Jamie dies before they can take the trip. We see Anna traveling through Europe alone, with the scenes cutting between her and imagined moments with Jamie. It's a sadder ending meant to underline his message about living in the moment: "forever is composed of nows."
Both versions do tell a love story set against the beauty of Oxford, but the book offers more time, depth, and emotional layering, while the movie delivers a faster, more streamlined, and more bittersweet version. For many readers, the novel's slow build and richer character development made the romance and relationships feel far more real and moving.
Final Thoughts
"My Oxford Year" has all the ingredients for a good romantic drama – a beautiful setting, an emotional story about love and loss, and talented actors. Unfortunately, poor execution, problematic elements, and weak performances make it hard to enjoy.
If you're interested in this story specifically, you might want to read the original book instead, which handles the characters and relationships much more thoughtfully.
The movie isn't completely terrible, the Oxford setting is gorgeous, and there are a few genuinely touching moments. But overall, it feels like a missed opportunity to tell a meaningful story about love, loss, and growing up. If you're craving a romance about terminal illness that actually earns its tears, skip this one and watch "Me Before You" instead. That film manages to handle similar themes with genuine emotion and better performances, proving that tragic love stories can be both heartbreaking and satisfying when done right.
Watch on Netflix