It’s tempting to call Netflix’s Through My Window a YA adaptation, but this Spanish teen romance features enough WHOA NELLY to put it firmly in the A camp. The movie’s based on a steamy Spanish-language novel by Ariana Godoy, a Venezuela-via-North Carolina romance writer who appears to be chasing the money that lies in the demographic nether between Fifty Shades and The Fault in Our Stars. The movie has plenty of OOMPH, if you know what I mean, but does it have enough of anything else to make it stand out among other young-love dramedies of its ilk? Let’s find out.
The Gist: Raquel (Clara Galle) is a senior in high school with a knack for writing, but she lacks the confidence to let anyone read it. This is an important detail, because it renders her something more than just an empty head hovering over a roiling pot of hormones that boils for the slab of meat who lives next door: Ares (Julio Pena), as in the God of War, a real son of the rich who lives in a mansion and works out like mad and apparently walks around with his butt out often enough to merit us seeing it in the film’s opening moments.
IF ONLY RAQUEL COULD SEE THAT BUTT. She sees everything else, stalking his Insta and such and saving all the photos on her hard drive, and staring at him from under the bleachers as he does shirtless workouts at futbol practice, and following him to the cemetery on a rainy day. Real healthy obsession you got there, Raquel. Might wanna see someone about that.
But guess what? He knows. Ares is well aware that she lusts after him like a horndog to another dog. There’s a convoluted contrivance where he steals her wifi and they have a heated exchange, and then he confronts her after the cemetery stalkery. It’s worth noting that Ares has rammed (get it?) many ewes in his short existence, and his brothers Apolo (Hugo Arbues) and Artemis (Eric Masip) – somebody stop their parents from having another boy and naming him Argo – and their family handler Sofia (Rachel Lascar) enable his womanizing. So he sees Raquel as another conquest, and cruelly/teasingly calls her “witch.” All is fair in war and love, y’know.
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