I’m no doomsayer, but the emergence of the streaming-original movie — replete with a plot that can be followed while scrolling through TikTok in another room — is quickly morphing into a cinematic implosion that, frankly, is far more pressing than artificial intelligence.
These are movies made by people who do not watch movies and merely have a passing awareness of them. Meanwhile, they’re operating in a sector of the industry that is so far up its own, lowest common denominator-focused tushy, that the end result could never be anything more than a piping hot pile of soulless after-squat. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you My Fault: London, the latest prong in one of Prime Video‘s most despicable families.
Per FlixPatrol, this regretful specimen has stumbled its way to the top of the United States’ Prime Video charts at the time of writing. Among the company it keeps is a second-place You’re Cordially Invited and a third-place Super Mario Bros. Movie. Elsewhere, Blink Twice (seventh place) and The Devil Wears Prada (10th place) hang their heads in despair — is this really what people are ignoring great movies for?
This purported romantic drama stars Asha Banks as Noah, a teenage girl who moves to London after her mom marries a rich guy who happens to have a son close to her age named Nick (Matthew Broome). They wouldn’t, right? Surely, they couldn’t, right? And yet, they do — they do, and the events surrounding them could not possibly be less consequential.
Let’s break this one down. My Fault: London is an English-language remake of the film My Fault (also know by its original Spanish title Culpa Mía), which was exclusively released to Prime Video way back in *checks notes* 2023. That Spanish film, meanwhile, is based on a Wattpad story by Argentine author Mercedes Ron. Its sequel, Culpa Tuya, hit Prime Video back on Christmas Eve, while the third and final film in this trilogy, Culpa Nuestra, will also turn up at some point.
All of these movies are about as enjoyable as getting waterboarded with lemon juice in the midst of the worst razor burn of your life. No one involved seems to understand that you can’t just throw circumstances at attractive young people and somehow get a good story out of it — you actually have to want to tell a story in the first place. That’s not happening here.
Worse yet, the fact of My Fault: London being an English-language remake only underlines the mission statement here — appeal to the broadest, most consumerist, most Western audience possible, and don’t skimp on the gratuitous needle drops and gender-specific toxicity that we’re meant to accept as normal.
Which brings us to the other elephant in the room — Noah is a teenager (in the Spanish-language original, she’s 17), whereas Nick is meant to be read as a handful of years older than that. This, ostensibly, is done to feed into the “que escándalo!” drama of their relationship (as if being step-siblings wasn’t enough) that the public seems willing to eat right up.
But can you imagine the fouls that would be cried if this were a queer relationship? Indeed, after decades of the public lumping gay people in with pedophiles — a trend that’s now continuing with trans people — it’s a special kind of disgusting to see unceremonious acceptance of inappropriate on-screen relationships that just happen to be comfortably heterosexual.
