A young woman in white socks and hot pants trudges out of a damp, steamy forest. She carries a black leather satchel on her back and her dark hair hangs shaggy over her shoulders. “The scariest thing in the forest is me,” she explains to her worried teacher. He laughs nervously at the provocative ambiguity: his far too young student presents herself to him as a lascivious danger – oh, oh!
In “Miller’s Girl” Jenna Ortega plays the slightly manic teenager Cairo Sweet. Cairo wants to seduce her teacher Jonathan Miller, who is three times her age – he is fascinated by his student’s literary interests and, well, also by her youthful body. There are misunderstandings and rejections, which ultimately result in Cairo’s feminist-derived act of revenge.
The film is a pompous, indecisive and at times unintentionally funny variant of the age-old “girl seduced by a middle-aged man disappointed in life” fantasy, in which, to make matters worse, Henry Miller is constantly used. Her appearance still fits perfectly into 21-year-old Ortega’s filmography – after all, she is primarily used to dark roles that show the multifaceted horror of being a teenager. Perhaps this also includes a failed acting excursion into the field of “fille fatale”.
Ortega started her career in a harmless Disney family series; her performance as a high school shooting survivor in “The Life After” won top critics awards; She later turned to screaming and screaming with roles in the “Scream” franchise and “The Babysitter” sequel “Killer Queen.” The Californian secured her most iconic role to date in the Netflix series “Wednesday” in 2022. As the daughter of the scary Addams family, Ortega played her way into the hearts of the audience wearing black braids – and with an eccentric dance performance, she became a viral hit that catapulted her into new spheres of fame with almost 40 million Instagram followers.
Fans have been waiting in vain for the sequel because of the screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood, and it won’t happen in 2024 either. This is probably why Ortega’s fans are currently rushing so eagerly to “Miller’s Girl” because in it she is the sexy, much meaner version of Wednesday: a girl who always wants to be a little different than everyone else. Her own little world with black candles and battered books is enough for her, the environment is manipulated to help her realize her ambitions, and it takes a long time for the realization to sink in that other people have feelings too.
And no matter how terrible you think Jenna Ortega’s new film is, it fits her “brand” as an actress, as they say in the marketing age. Part of her recipe for success is to transfer the dark, morbid aura of her roles into real life. She likes to be Hollywood’s non-conformist emo girl.
As a child, Ortega is said to have dissected dead lizards, her often-copied fringed hairstyle is called “Wolf Cut”, her favorite band is Radiohead, she scribbles in “spider script”, as she puts it, in a black diary, the rumor is circulating in fan forums, she is a Satanist. Ortega told the New York Times in an interview: “Horror feels like home to me. It’s comfortable because you’re not trying to impress anyone.”
The penchant for carefully staged darkness is well received by their Gen Z target group. Only: Maybe it would be worth trying something new for the next film – we now slowly know that Jenna Ortega can pull a bad-tempered pout and stare down her film classmates with a scowl.
