Summary
The chemistry between the leads carries Your Fault: London through an overly familiar, often frustrating script, but there’s still no real reason to see yet another version of this story.
Streaming platforms are nothing if not predictable. When Prime Video’s Spanish-language adaptations of Mercedes Ron’s Culpables trilogy – My Fault, Your Fault, and Our Fault – proved to be slam-bang successes, wringing every drop of appeal out of the slightly icky Wattpad story about stepsibling sexual attraction became an inevitability. The first sputter from the same teat was My Fault: London, the same story to a fault, just with British accents. The second is Your Fault: London, the – all together now – same story as the sequel, just with more British accents.
I’m generally of the belief that we, as a culture, should probably be less keen to adapt self-published erotica-lite about vaguely uncouth sexual dynamics (that’s how the 50 Shades series came into being, and we know how that turned out), but these movies are pretty tame in that regard, swapping overt sex and nudity for a more broadly appealing YA sensibility that makes them even more asinine.
And this middle chapter is where everything is supposed to kick into gear. After the events of the previous film, Noah (Asha Banks, A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder) and Nick (Matthew Broome, The Buccaneers) are continuing to see one another behind the backs of their disapproving parents, but their own circumstances threaten to pull them apart. Noah goes off to Oxford, and Nick goes off to work at his father’s company, and these diverging tracks introduce new hurdles into their already complex, unconventional relationship, with new pressures and people widening the cracks in whatever foundation was developed the first time around.
The first movie worked – more or less – on the strength of the burgeoning romance; here are two people who probably shouldn’t be together finding the idea of being together too exciting to ignore. But the sequel is a different dramatic proposition. We’ve already had the most alluring stage. What we’re left with is a constant stream of reminders about why getting together was a terrible idea in the first place, an almost cartoonish string of miscommunications and misfortunes designed, essentially, to punish Noah and Nick for their choices.
This isn’t a terrible idea in and of itself, and putting a relationship through the wringer is a romance staple as old as time. But the way it manifests in Your Fault: London is largely through petty bickering and conflict that could easily be resolved through the most basic conversation. The long-distance hook makes it all too easy for Nick and Noah’s problems to worsen by simply being avoided, allowing every cliché – jealousy, love triangles et al – to take on outsized proportions for silly reasons. After a while, you just become sick of the pair of them.
It could perhaps be an audience thing. This is a screenplay built on chaos; it’s explicitly about things going avoidably wrong. The target demographic probably loves that. As someone increasingly outside the age range that’d care about a romance – and thus a movie – like this, I’m a tougher sell. But even with that in mind, it’s hard to make a case for the core story when so much of it exists for such contrived reasons.
There’s an upside, though, and that remains Asha Banks and Matthew Broome. Their chemistry is genuinely excellent, and that counts for a lot in a story that is intended to push them together and pull them apart at a near-constant rate. We have to believe in their jealousy, their passion, their anger and frustration, and for the most part, we do. For young performers, these kinds of roles are generally quite thankless, just stepping stones to better career opportunities. And while that might ultimately end up being the case, it’s hard to argue that they don’t do their utmost to sell the romance and the drama, even as the third-act developments devolve into melodramatics.
Some of this stuff, I’m reliably informed, is against the spirit of the original books. I haven’t read them, so I couldn’t say, but to me it all felt so similar to the original Your Fault movie that the question I kept returning to was why we needed to see it again in a different language. Some respect is due for how content this movie is to simply be this movie, or I suppose to be this movie again, and not try to reinvent the wheel genre-wise. It’s comforting in that sense. Anyone looking for a very specific type of experience will get it, just not for the first time. Anyone looking for anything more will find themselves left wanting, but I’d probably argue that they’re looking in the wrong place.
