Through My Window (2022)

Through My Window arrives from Spain by way of Netflix, a teen romance in which a girl named Raquel pines after the wealthy boy next door, a boy whose family owns a corporate empire and whose courtship technique involves hacking her laptop to steal the Wi-Fi password. The setting is Barcelona, the cast is Spanish, and the film makes no fuss about either fact. Class is the engine here: her humble house sits in the shadow of the Hidalgo mansion, and the gap between them lands hardest when Raquel watches her own mother wait tables at his family's party. The screenplay treats this as a wound, not an argument. There is no indictment of the empire, only the ache of standing on the wrong side of its gate.

Raquel narrates, she writes, she eventually publishes a book, and the film gestures toward her finding a voice. Reviewers spotted those gestures too, noting the empowerment and the old toxic cliches in the same breath. Fair enough. Her suitor climbs through her window uninvited, lies to her, dismisses her, and is rewarded with devotion. The story understands this is a problem and decides it is a feature.

This is a soapy melodrama with no sermon attached. Nobody lectures us about the environment, about identity, about the sins of capital. The film wants steam and longing and a sequel or two, and it gets them. It is not attempting to improve anyone. There is something almost restful in that, though restful is not the same as good, and the aggregate score of zero percent from the critics suggests the distinction has been noted. The Hidalgo fortune remains intact. So does the audience's patience, barely. What the film offers instead of a message is a boy on a windowsill, which is its own kind of thesis, and a thin one.