Your Fault (2024)

Your Fault arrives as the second panel of a Spanish trilogy adapted from Mercedes Ron's Culpables novels, and it conducts itself accordingly. Noah and Nick, step-siblings by marriage and lovers by stubborn inclination, endure a summer of beach parties, a college flat, a roommate of uncertain motives, and a stolen toothbrush. There is a cocaine errand, a street race, an intercepted photograph, and a suicide threat deployed as a plot device. The film became the most-watched non-English language title in its platform's history, which tells us a great deal about appetite and almost nothing about virtue.

The cast is Spanish and Latino by the plain fact of its setting, not by any casting directive worth cataloguing. Noah carries the story, and she talks with her friend Jenna about boys, but the film's concerns are romantic and familial. It does not interrogate patriarchy. It does not interrogate much of anything. A suicide attempt and a passing reference to a psychologically delicate character brush against mental health, yet no neurodivergent experience is named or explored. There are no queer characters, no racial themes, no climate anxiety, and no body-positive messaging. Lion worries about money and the family business, which is the anxiety of a wealthy young man, not a critique of capital.

What remains is a soap opera with strong production values and a commitment to melodrama that borders on the operatic. Peter Bradshaw compared it unfavorably to daytime television. He was not wrong, and he was not the audience. The film sermonizes about nothing. It has no thesis to advance, no lesson to impart, no ideology to smuggle into the third act. It wants you to feel things about beautiful people behaving badly in Madrid, and on that narrow front it succeeds. As a document of social consciousness, it is close to a blank page. As a document of streaming metrics, it is a landmark. The ledger records a low tally, and the ledger is not sentimental.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel", "book_adaptation"]}