Colombian-American actress Sofia Carson has become the queen of romantic dramas, with her stint at Netflix including Purple Hearts and The Life List. Now she’s the star of My Oxford Year alongside Corey Mylchreest, in which Anna De La Vega (Carson) decides to spend a year abroad studying at Oxford University. She soon starts up a fling with her poetry course instructor Jamie Davenport, determined not to let their relationship grow more serious. But when he reveals that he has cancer, the course of their lives–and Anna’s dreams–completely change forever.
The movie initially stood out to me because I studied abroad at Oxford during my junior year in college. Though I didn’t end up living out Anna’s story, I loved that her wide-eyed optimism, wonder, and joy mirrored so much of my experience. There were many times during my viewing of the film when I pointed out certain architectural features and buildings in the background that I recognized, such as Magdalen College, the Bodleian Library (“the Bod,” we called it), the Radcliffe Camera, and the Bridge of Sighs. For a significant portion of the movie, I felt as though I was time-traveling back to my former self and a time when those places and people were the center of my life.
However, this blast-to-the-past feeling did not serve or elevate the film as a complete project. It felt like it came straight out of the mid-2000s, back when rom-coms and romantic dramas were obsessed with stories about cancer, disability, and death. Witnessing Jamie’s cancer diagnosis reveal and its fallout instantly reminded me of The Fault in Our Stars (2014), Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (2015), Me Before You (2016), and nearly every Nicolas Sparks movie ever made since 2002.
Though they were all at one point critically acclaimed, these films have since become a fixed product of their time due to their problematic representations of disability. While the love interests all have different disabilities–Gus has bone cancer, Rachel has leukemia, and Will is tetraplegic–they each go on to die in the end with conveniently enough time to reassure and motivate the main character to “go after their dreams” and “live fearlessly” when they couldn’t. It’s a formula that’s tired, cliché, and frankly dangerous, but one that My Oxford Year has no problem repeating in 2025, down to Jamie choosing to forgo treatment in favor of dying on his own terms and telling Anna to “live deliberately” after he’s gone.
Not only is this just sappy, bad writing (Jamie seems to have a rare type of cancer, but the film is so vague that it’s barely given a name), but it also sends the message that it’d be better for a disabled person to die than to live out the rest of their lives with a disability. It makes their death a source of existential inspiration to the main character in a way that never happens when other able-bodied characters die. In fact, a disabled person’s death is almost never treated as a loss but as a lesson to never take life for granted and an opportunity for the main character to center themselves in their pursuit of happiness and adventure. Disabled people become ghosts even before their death, existing only to serve the plot and the main character’s growth instead of being allowed to have rich and fulfilling lives.
Ultimately, this movie didn’t feel like it was breaking new ground within its genre or saying something we hadn’t heard before. It was bad enough that Anna was breaking a bunch of student bylaws pursuing a romantic relationship with her professor without having her give up huge professional opportunities for him, and making the depiction of his cancer so familiar that it came across as boring. Even the dialogue from the British characters felt awkward and offbeat, as if the writers had never spoken to British people before or were only familiar with the local culture through an American lens.
Despite its promise and Carson’s strong performance, the movie is somewhat forgettable, and I do wish it had been more of a traditional romantic movie to complement the beautiful setting. We need other, better movies, featuring disabled characters and depicting disabilities not as a setback but as just another part of what can often be a long, full, and rich life.
