My Fault (2023)

My Fault arrives from Spain with the swagger of a film that knows precisely what it is and has no plans to apologize for it. Noah, seventeen and aggrieved by her mother's marriage to a wealthy man named William Leister, relocates to a Marbella mansion and immediately starts sparring with her new stepbrother Nick, a brooding specimen with a fight club habit and a car he cannot afford to lose. The narrative runs on forbidden attraction, illegal street racing, and an impressive quantity of smoldering in doorways. Amazon reports it as the most watched film on its platform in 2023. That fact says something about the audience, and possibly something about all of us.

On the matter of cultural consciousness, the film is a modest specimen. Its Spanish-language production and wholly Spanish cast reflect an origin, not a casting directive. Noah is introduced as proud and independent, and she does beat a male racer who then throws a tantrum about losing to a woman, which lends the proceedings a thin feminist varnish over what remains a conventional romance about being desired by a sullen man. The class friction is similarly light: she rejects the mansion's luxury, wears a Ramones t-shirt to dinner, and calls Nick a trust fund baby, but the wealth stays aspirational scenery. Race, queerness, climate, body politics, neurodivergence, and historical revision are entirely absent, and the film does not seem to grieve their absence.

Most welcome is the near-total lack of sermonizing. The heroine's abusive father, her scar, and her terror of the dark are dramatized with the blunt efficiency of a paperback, never explained to us as a lesson. What we have here is a self-aware, glossy, faintly disreputable romance that wants nothing more than to be watched in one sitting. It succeeds. The classification is dull, but the film is not pretending otherwise.