My Oxford Year, the latest attempt to glamorise the Oxford experience as something other than sleepless nights in libraries, expensive pints and haughty hierarchies, was released on Netflix this past summer. The film follows an American exchange student’s arrival at the University, where she is treated like a shocking rarity amongst a student population whose slang seems stuck in the 1950s. She soon falls for her supposedly charismatic postgrad tutor before all the standard beats of a rom-com play out.

I watched the movie in a small cottage huddled against the Welsh coastline in Carmarthenshire, with a gorgeous view of the rise and fall of the tide and only a few hundred metres from where the great Welsh poet and writer, Dylan Thomas, used to live in Laugharne. Whether Thomas would commend Netflix for commissioning the movie, or the cast for their rather dialed-back performances, is as questionable as the movie’s grasp of Oxford’s geography. But clearly there must be some appeal to the fictitious conception of Oxford the movie strives to sell.

Neither the plot of the movie, nor its cast, direction, production or editing, will win plaudits, and it is a shame it missed the recognition at last year’s Razzies (the Oscars underaccomplished twin, awarded to the worst movies released each year) it rightfully deserved. But just as no one watches Sharknado out of genuine artistic interest, My Oxford Year did not intend to challenge recent cinematic masterpieces like One Battle After Another or Oppenheimer. If you went into the movie expecting greatness from one of the dime-a-dozen films Netflix produces in order to keep you subscribed over the tedious summer months, then you were probably looking in the wrong place. Like going into a petting zoo to find a high-wire trapeze performer, it wasn’t just that the product was bad; you went in with entirely the wrong expectations .

Midway through the otherwise drab but enjoyable movie, it takes a sudden turn for the dramatic with the elevation of an illness plot that redirects the entire movie. I won’t provide further details to avoid spoilers, but the drama is so sudden and artificial that it feels like an entirely separate movie. If you were to watch the first half of the movie, pre-plot twist, you could come away from it pleasantly pleased. The movie to that point was not awful – no Spielberg certainly, but the sort of pleasant fare they might play in a hospital waiting room. If you returned after a while and forgot the first half, not only would you appear to be watching an entirely different movie, but one where the stakes the movie attempts to utilise are so ham-fistedly raised that you would have no alternative but to laugh.

The stakes were so low that the audience could happily watch without sympathising with the exaggerated characters, and instead enjoy the obscene hilarity of how bad the movie was. The characters spoke as if cryogenically preserved back in the 1950s – no one in their early 20s has used the term ‘nice bit of crumpet’ to describe anything other than the eponymous good since the Beatles topped the charts, Wilson was prime minister, and vinyl was still a novelty. The movie’s idea of Oxford, where cars lurk around every corner to provide plot-critical inconveniences for the protagonist and half of the university are the heirs to peerages or great industrial legacies, is plainly facetious. The characters seemed bowled over by the presence of an American in their little rinky-dink English town, as if they are not meant to be as smart as the stereotypically self-righteous American protagonist?

The film ignores the fact that Oxford’s undergraduate community is 20% international students, with that proportion rising to a third when the entire student body is taken into account. Or that the general profile of the Oxford student body, despite efforts from the colleges and the University to diversify it, still skews disproportionately towards the sort of private-school background that all but guarantees exposure to foreign cultures and communities both near and far. Or even that Oxford as a city is an exceedingly diverse place, with the Cowley Road and Jericho boasting thriving immigrant communities and an array of international restaurants. The characters in My Oxford Year appear to have stumbled out of a sort of little Englander Narnia, where everyone performs their roles to a stereotype.

Don’t watch My Oxford Year expecting a realistic depiction of what it is really like to study and live here. Don’t watch it expecting a heart-rending romance or a compelling drama: its attempts to be either of these are so tone-deaf that they provoke laughter rather than tears. Instead, watch it in the same spirit you might have watched You’ve Been Framed, Total Wipeout, or any of the celebrity renditions of erstwhile British TV: a thoughtless, simple laugh, and a good way to waste two hours with nothing better to do.