Miss Charlotte Hanson is a high school English teacher who is not overly engaged with her work. She is sluggish in submitting her fall semester paperwork to her principal, and she describes her teaching of literature as "droning on about dead writers." In teaching Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet," Miss Hanson's question for the students is, "Why does Tybalt fight the Montagues?" Answer: "Because he's a Capulet and hates them!"
Rather than challenge her students, Miss Hanson caves into them, allowing them to watch a video version of the play along with discussions of each of the five acts. This decision will come back to haunt her when one of her students decides to insert compromising video footage into the class members' streaming devices.
The student's name is Chris Williams, a pathological liar and murderer with a demented fixation on blonde teachers resembling Miss Hanson. Already, Miss Martin and Miss Beth Singer are teachers who have been dispatched by Chris. Prior to the fall semester, Chris lies about his age and seduces Miss Hanson. He then proceeds to harass and terrorize her and, as well as other soul that gets in his psychotic way. When he murders the kind Vice-Principal who harbors suspicions about him, Chris makes the administrator's death look like a suicide.
In addition to her teaching, Miss Hanson is an aspiring writer of a romance novel. She goes out of her way to have a fling with young Chris to be "inspired" in her novel and to get over her writer's block. As it turns out, her poor judgment results in a local scandal for which she could lose her job.
But the little experiment does lead to a new concept for her novel, which turns into "My Deadly Student." On the dust jacket of the book is the image of an apple from which someone has taken a large bite. In her own life, Charlotte had taken a bite of the apple exactly like Eve. The viewer of this well-crafted film must wait to the final scene to learn who is ultimately expelled from the classroom and the Garden of Eden.
