SURPRISED BY OXFORD

Name: SURPRISED BY OXFORD
Item: SURPRISED BY OXFORD
Author: Cooper Dowd

"One Student’s Journey to Truth"

Family Content: -1 Caution advised for older children, including teenagers, and sensitive adults.

Entertainment Quality:

	None	Light	Moderate	Heavy
Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

SURPRISED BY OXFORD is the true story of Carolyn Weber. Carolyn, better known by her classmates as Caro, discovers her greatest love is reading. She flies through undergrad studies and receives an academic scholarship to attend Oxford University. At Oxford, Carolyn embarks on a journey to achieve her doctoral degree. However, through professors and peers, Carolyn comes face to face with her greatest fears, insecurities and misconceptions about life. She must decide what to believe about friendship, truth, God, and morality. Will fear cause her to push those who love her away? Or, will Carolyn learn to surrender herself to a greater truth?

SURPRISED BY OXFORD is a refreshing faith-based romance that stresses story, character and quality. The movie’s strong moral and faith themes are subtle, and never preachy. The production values and acting masterfully succeed in painting a compelling portrait of conversion and

enlightenment to absolute morality, God and true joy. Flawlessly intermingled with Caro’s conversion to spiritual truth is a heartfelt love story. However, SURPRISED BY OXFORD has some foul language, drunkenness and adult conversations. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children.

Content:

(CC, BB, LL, V, S, N, AA, S)

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong Christian, moral worldview contains many Christian elements like prayer, apologetics, Church, and scripture, there is an especially powerful scene where two characters talk about God’s grace in everyday life, and the movie stresses uplifting themes of seeking out the truth, friendship, and forgiveness

Foul Language:

Some foul language throughout, including about 10 “s” words, one lighter obscenities and several OMG profanities (the language, while probably accurate to the characters, does feel out of place at times)

Violence:

No blood or gore, but in one scene a little girl witnesses a violent intense outburst from her father, and there are discussions about death

Sex:

No explicit sex, but there are many conversations about sex, but none of them are graphic, one character loudly explains that he and a girl “shagged,” a male student talks about his virginity and his struggle to remain a virgin, and several characters are seen kissing

Nudity:

Upper male nudity when a shower breaks and there’s the image of a man with a towel around his waist

Alcohol Use:

Carolyn witnesses the college party scene, several scenes depict drunkenness, but they are shown to be immoral

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs;

Miscellaneous Immorality:

dialogue for mature audiences.

More Detail:

SURPRISED BY OXFORD is the true story of Carolyn Weber, based on her memoir of the same name.

As a young girl, Carolyn’s world is flipped upside down when she witnesses her father go to prison. Growing up with just her mother, Carolyn discovers she not only loves books and academia, but that she’s brilliant at literary analysis.

Carolyn flies through her early studies and is encouraged by her college professor to pursue a post-grad doctoral degree. Carolyn wants nothing more than to achieve this degree, and the door is opened for her when she receives a letter from Oxford University, offering her an academic scholarship. Carolyn decides to fly to England and begin her study of Romantic literature.

While her central goal is working toward her degree, Carolyn meets a colorful group of people from all different backgrounds. One friend, Kent, is an attractive senior who clearly has feelings for Carolyn. However, their relationship gets off to a rocky start, when he reveals he’s a Christian, believes in chastity, and draws meaning from what he believes about God.

Carolyn finds it hard to accept God as an answer to deep-seated insecurities that stem from her childhood. However, offerings of help come from peers and professors alike, that force Carolyn to make a choice about what she believes.

She’s further distracted from her studies when Kent tells her to read the book SURPRISED BY JOY by C.S. Lewis. She starts to seek out truth for herself, but her tendency is to push people away when she faces the unknown.

Will Carolyn continue to learn about God, grace, and the source of true joy? Or, will Carolyn continue to push away those who love her most?

SURPRISED BY OXFORD is a compelling love story intermingled with a story about coming to faith in God, absolute truth, and joy. The acting, production quality, and pacing all serve to paint a captivating, yet subtle, portrait of conversion and enlightenment to the truth of God.

SURPRISED BY OXFORD is a refreshing take on the faith-based genre as it focuses on story and character first and lets the apologetics and conversations regarding faith happen naturally, in a non-preachy way. However, the movie does contain adult conversations, drunkenness and some foul language. Whether accurate to the characters or not, the foul language sometimes feels out of place.

That said, SURPRISED BY OXFORD tells a compelling love story about a brilliant student coming to the true reality of God’s grace in her life and Him being the only source of real Joy.

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Quality:

- Content: -1