Summary
Looking At You brings the Through My Window trilogy to a perfunctory, predictable, and contrived conclusion.
Through My Window 3: Looking At You – which, I think we can all agree, doesn’t even sound like a real title – is one of those movies that you can predict in its entirety just by looking at the premise. It doesn’t help that it’s the third in a trilogy, all three of which have come out in less than a year on Netflix, presenting one of the silliest and least interesting on-screen romances in quite some time as a single elongated narrative that ultimately goes nowhere you didn’t expect it to five minutes into the first movie.
This is the grand culmination of the overly sexualized and slightly creepy love story of Raquel and Ares, two nonentities who communicate almost entirely through Wi-Fi passwords and break-ins. Their relationship has been through a lot in the last two movies, coming to an end following the death of Raquel’s friend Yoshi, who is constantly namedropped in Looking At You to the extent he feels like a ghost haunting the screenplay.
Following the ending of Through My Window 2: Across the Sea, Ares and Raquel aren’t together. They’re cracking on with other people. Raquel is with Gregory and Ares is with Vera, though neither is thrilled about their respective partnerships, which rapidly becomes clear when Ares comes home for the holidays.
Looking At You is, weirdly, a Christmas film. It takes place over the holiday season and has some of the usual festive beats you’d expect on top of all the typical romantic tropes, so it’s cliched in an almost fractal way. It certainly lacks the good cheer of most Christmas movies, though, feeling intensely grim and serious throughout. There’s a joke here and there, but most of the ways in which this is hilarious are unintentional.
For instance, Raquel keeps a photograph of her and Ares right below a photograph of her and Gregory. She journals her love for him – it’s in the guise of a novel, but I honestly can’t see how it isn’t just a diary – openly and leaves her laptop lying around so that Gregory can stumble on her innermost desires. There’s a suggestion she does this intentionally to bring about a more rapid end to her sham relationship, but I don’t think she does; I think she’s just a character in a movie whose every action is designed for the sake of cheap drama.
Through My Window 3 is that kind of movie, with those kinds of characters. You can see the seams all the time, as the script awkwardly navigates to the next sex scene – mercifully done with relatively decent taste here – or quasi-dramatic moment, most of which are signposted a mile off. There’s never any real doubt about what the ending will be, and the same can be said for the various subplots involving Ares’s relatives.
Nobody Cares
Through My Window 3 is also another kind of movie – critic-proof. People love them, and those who enjoyed the first two will doubtlessly feel the same about this one. The climactic installment exists for the benefit of those people and not to please folks like me, whose literal job is to be critical about the process and pick holes in the experience.
I could do that a lot more here, but really, what’s the point? Looking At You isn’t a good movie by any traditional metric. It’s full of contrivance, it’s overly predictable, the characters and plot are uninteresting, and there are pretty worthwhile questions that should probably be asked about the romanticization of a rich dude hopping through someone’s window as a symbol of passion and romance. But nobody cares about any of this and if I wasn’t being paid to I don’t think I would either.
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