Fans of Jenna Ortega are going to want to see “Miller’s Girl,” even if it is a bit over-the top. A contemporary Southern Gothic tale of a forbidden romance between a failed writer-turned-high-school literature teacher and his precocious and brilliant senior student by the name of Cairo Sweet (Ortega). The teacher’s name is – apologies to the real, deceased one – Jonathan Miller (Martin Freeman), and he has written one book, a collection of short stories with the infuriatingly twee title “Apostrophes and Ampersands.” The three critics who reviewed it, savaged it, the devils.

Everything in “Miller’s Girl” is over-decorated: the sentences flowing from the mouths of Jonathan, Cairo, Jonathan’s sexy writer-wife Beatrice (Dagmara Domincyzk), the shabby chic interiors and the buildings covered in kudzu, a vine that “feeds on the souls of the dead.”

The film is set in Tennessee (it was shot in Georgia). But we feel the spirit of tortured word master Edgar Allan Poe in every corner, if not every spiral of kudzu. Cairo, who opens the proceedings with a voice-over in which she tells us that she is 18, lives in a “tomb of a house’ and that her parents are “permanently abroad.” Of course, we assume that means she poisoned them, and they reside in the garden or basement. Later in the story, Jonathan and Cairo attend a poetry salon where we will meet even more Southern-fried literary weirdos, including, egad, an actor.

Cairo, who carries around a copy of James Joyce’s word soup “Finnegan’s Wake,” is Ortega’s famous other self Wednesday Addams’ Southern Gothic kissing cousin. When, after she emerges from a forest outside the school, Jonathan’s friend and colleague Boris (Bashir Salahuddin) asks Cairo if she’s afraid to walk alone in the wood, she retorts, “I’m the scariest thing in there.” Cairo’s best friend is Winnie (Gideon Adlon), a provocatively dressed lesbian (sort of), trying to throw herself at Boris. Cairo and Winnie are twin temptresses, and there is sexual frisson flowing between them as well.

In spite all the overwritten and self-indulgent dialogue, I enjoyed the film’s verbosity and tendency to name drop authors and works of literature. I would be hard-pressed to name a recent film that is as in love with words as “Miller’s Girl.” In a difficult role, Freeman makes the besotted teacher an incurable romantic, at least in his eyes. Written and directed by Jade Halley Bartlett, making her film, debut, “Miller’s Girl” was produced by Seth Rogan and his partner Evan Goldberg among others.

It’s a nicely made indie film, the sort of thing we don’t see a lot of anymore. When is the last time you heard literary hell-raiser Henry Miller called out (and used as the inspiration for a perfectly filthy tale written by Cairo as her midterm paper)? If you like Ortega in “Wednesday,” you’re going to like her in this finely cast, if not entirely successful effort. Stick around to hear the great Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” over the end credits.

(“Miller’s Girl” contains profanity, underage drinking and sexually suggestive material)

“Miller’s Girl”

Rated R. At the AMC Boston Common, AMC Methuen 20 and other suburban theaters.

Grade: B +