Stream It Or Skip It: ‘My Fault’ on Amazon Prime Video, a YA Lustfest About Stepsiblings Who Can’t Control Their Desires

Soapy Spanish rom-dram My Fault (now streaming on Amazon Prime Video) pushes the boundaries of young adult a little closer to adult-adult, being several degrees steamier than, say, Twilight, but still cooler than the scalding cheese of something like Fifty Shades. Based on the first of a trilogy of books by Spanish-Argentine novelist Mercedes Ron, the film stars Nicole Wallace as a teenager who falls hard for her new stepbrother and makes us all really really uncomfortable about it. Seems like a problematic narrative, but maybe the movie will find a way to wiggle out of the ethical quandary the situation presents.  

MY FAULT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: She’s Noah (Wallace) and she takes no shit. Antagonize her, and she’ll slice you up. She’s very much in lash-out mode these days: Her mother Rafaella (Marta Hazas) just married a bazillionaire, so they’re moving into his gargantu-mansion, far away from Noah’s school and boyfriend and friends, and she’s not happy about it. She might be impressed with her far-beyond-fancy new home with its gates and butlers and limos, but she’ll be damned if she says anything positive about anything right now, or admit that anything ever makes her happy. “I just got here and everyone hates me already,” she laments, showing an alarming lack of self-awareness. TEENAGERS, RIGHT? Such drama.

But then she meets her new stepbrother Nick (Gabriel Guevara), who walks into the room like someone just dumped water on the coals: sizzle sizzle. They instantly “hate” each other, of course. They exchange they-doth-protest-too-much barbed banter in spite of all the blood that’s rushing to their groins. Nick is 21 and angling for entry into the Badboy Hall of Fame. Noah ends up at a party, watching shirtless Nick lick tequila off a variety of bimbos’ breasts. She ends up at another party, watching Nick street-race his Very Expensive Sports Automobile against recently incarcerated gangsta-creeps. She ends up at yet another party, watching Nick bareknuckle box chiseled brutes. We get it: He’s tough, he’s cocky, he’s violent and if you put him on a platter with some A-1 steak sauce, she’ll eat him alive.

But you’ll find Noah is full of surprises. At the street-race party, she gets behind the wheel of Nick’s Porsche and beats the main gangsta-creep, embarrassing him. See, her dad was a racecar driver, and taught her a thing or two before he ended up in jail for doing heinous things, things hinted at in recurring traumatic flashbacks. It’s a narrative timeline that tells us her dad has been incarcerated for many years now, so he apparently taught her how to drive when she was, I dunno, eight years old? I’m not so sure about the math of your narrative timeline here, Lou. Either way, we’re here now, watching Noah and Nick bicker until they finally mash face and participate in a totally hawwt scene prompting us to ponder whether or not it’s logically possible to dry hump in a pool – and the romantic temp only gets hawwter from there, considering how forbidden and secret their lusty-lust is. Meanwhile, Noah keeps getting threatening texts and notes from an anonymous antagonist, the identity of which is so obvious, even Stimpson J. Cat could figure out who it is in no time flat. Now, will this plot resolve itself in a non-ridiculous manner? NO SPOILERS, but that seems pretty much impossible.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This is teen-romance crud drafting off the likes of Like Crazy or All the Bright Places with softer-core Fifty Shades sex scenes, half-assed Fast and Furious race/party sequences and a few oogy Lolita vibes. It also recalls the After franchise.

Performance Worth Watching: I feel like Wallace and Guevara would make a convincingly magnetic couple in a movie that wasn’t so blatantly moronic. Maybe next time kids! 

Memorable Dialogue: This is so embarrassing, I’m cringing as I type it:

Nick: This isn’t right.

Noah: It isn’t right at all.

Nick: You’re my stepsister and you’re 17.

Noah. Then kiss me until I’m 18.

Sex and Skin: Male/female rear nudeness, some steamy sexytimes that are more suggestive than explicit and faux-artsy-fartsy and admittedly fairly hot until you realize we’re sidling up next to an uncomfortable taboo and putting our hand on its thigh.

Our Take: OK, whose fault is My Fault anyway wocka wocka! Is it Ron’s, for conceiving this ludicrous scenario that’s a rancid distillation of many annoying and not very good things that came before it? Is it writer/director Domingo Gonzalez for herky-jerking us around between terrible romance, terrible action and terrible family drama? Is it both of them for executing a plot whose primary component is nonsense, and vomiting forth such chunderously godawful dialogue as “You don’t need kisses, you need volcanic eruptions in your mouth”? (Maybe it comes off better in its native Spanish, but I have my doubts.) 

I rest my case. Actually, I don’t: The characters are insipid and rudimentary, crudely carved from the granite of countless hoary cliches. Noah’s traumatic backstory is trite and unconvincing; she’s characterized as a mouthy type who reads, like, actual books (Pride and Prejudice, Romeo and Juliet) and sandpapers our asses from her very first scene – she’s the world’s most petulant Austenite. And Nick, well, he’s not any of that, and that’s about it, although he has a little half-sister with diabetes (WEEP FOR HER) who exists in the soft part of his heart, although that part isn’t nearly as mushy as his brain. 

Spending time with these two and their perfunctory, color-by-numbers romance – studded with witless I-hate-you/I-wanna-eff-you banter – is annoying and excruciating even if you can temporarily ward off the distant thunder in your guts warning us to stop wanting to see them have sex (they are physically attractive human beings) in spite of how deliriously close they are to committing jailbait incest. That mighty conflict between moral reasoning and pelvic desire is enough to tie your intestines in a knot, but one thing is abundantly clear: This is an atrocious movie. 

Our Call: Oh, and it sets itself up for a sequel. Get the f— outta here. SKIP IT. 

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.