Culpa Tuya (English translation: Your Fault) is the sequel to 2023’s Culpa Mia (aka My Fault), the Spanish young-lust forbidden-romance drama about shtoinking stepsiblings that ended up being a smash hit for Amazon Prime Video. Like, yuck? On multiple levels? Well, the awkwardness remains wholly intact for this, the second in a (sigh) trilogy that keeps the cast and filmmaker intact for the continuation of this story that’s positively bursting with jealousy, betrayal, street racing and incest-adjacent love. Stars Nicole Wallace and Gabriel Guevara once again find themselves saddled with insipid dialogue and working through nonsense plotting while we drink too much wine and hope the movie takes itself so seriously it inspires gales of laughter. If only it was that fun.
CULPA TUYA: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Noah (Wallace) is FINALLY 18. That means she’s totally legal now! How convenient! Convenient for Nick (Guevara), who’s 21 and has been sexing her sexyparts for a while despite her underagedness, and the fact that his gasquillionaire father, William (Ivan Sanchez), married her mother, Rafaella (Marta Hazas), so they’re technically brother and sister. How do we feel about this sitch? Ambivalent? Sure seems like it, considering how many of you watched the first movie. Shall we move on like this is acceptable? No choice, because the movie certainly does. But I guess the taboo-skirting content is part of the allure. It’s SO DANGEROUS, you can’t help but feel alive!
Anyway. William and Rafaella are NOT happy about any of this, so they get to scheming their children to stop playing Hide the Hot Dog, Stepsib Edition. Nick is back from San Fran and interning at his father’s law firm, where ol’ William has situated Sofia (Gabriela Andrada) and her tiiiigggghhhhtttttttt dresses within his eyeline. Uh-ohsies! Noah is freshly graduated and off to college, where she rooms with Briar (Alex Bejar) in a swank apartment for the children of rich people. Interestingly, Noah’s new neighbor is a character whose name is, I believe, Jimmy Distracterfrümnick (Javier Morgade), because he’s got a smolder happening there. Also interestingly, Nick seems to recognize Briar, surely from his Secret Tragic Past, but neither acknowledges it. In case you’re not sure how movies like this work – namely, rudimentarily – this means you should file that one for future reference.
Before we get to the series of half-assed episodes comprising the plot of this slopfest, we should note that Nick gives Noah a heart necklace that looks like he impulse-bought it while standing in line at CVS, because there’s no better way for a rich guy to proclaim his love to the stepsister he’s banging. To be fair, he also buys her a metallic purple Mercedes convertible, and she fawns over its 18-inch alloy wheels, a reminder that she can drive fast cars very fast in races where cars go very fast, should one occur in the third act of this movie just like one occurred in the third act of the previous movie. He also asks Noah to move in with him in his new apartment, which inspires a running joke about how he doesn’t need any furniture, just a safe and a pull-up bar – the movie’s most clever bit, which ain’t saying much, jack.
As for the half-assed episodes: Nick’s mother (Goya Toledo) turns up to dish some hard pipe-hittin’ truths. Nick’s pal Lion (Victor Varona) is hard up for cash, which inspires a drug-delivery/pool-hall-brawl sequence so stupid, you’ll be glad it wasn’t cut from the movie despite being the equivalent of a screenplay’s third appendix. Noah adopts a kitty so we’re privy to cute cat reaction shots. Briar starts talking like Gollum. Nick and Sofia go to London to rescue a court case from the dumpster. Jimmy Distracterfrümnick puts a move or two on Noah. Good god, can Nick and Noah’s troo luv survive all this? SPOILERS BEGONE.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Nick and Norah’s Ultimate Playlist. Otherwise, the Culpas are the incesty versions of similar bilge like the After and Through My Window franchises.
Performance Worth Watching: All I know is, I kinda want to put the entire cast into witness protection.
Memorable Dialogue: Noah’s friend Jenna (Eva Ruiz) cuts to the quick of Noah’s relationship with Nick: “You’re sure squeezing the most out of him, aren’t you sweetie? You extract all his juice.”
Sex and Skin: A few rather tepid juice-extraction sequences: no visible bits, a slight bit of buttcheek, faces unconvincingly reaching for ecstasy.
Our Take: Nothing about Culpa Tuya makes sense. Granted, people don’t watch movies like this for their narrative coherence, so such commentary is akin to criticizing water for making everything it touches wet. There’s a scene here in which our core collection of characters participates in not only a bar brawl where cocktail glasses are smashed over heads that only suffer light abrasions, but also the delivery of about, I dunno, 25 grand worth of uncut cocaine, and everyone gets arrested but also gets to walk away with zero consequence, save for Noah, who whines, “That made me miss my first day of college!” It’s the most realistic part of the film, because it implies that people adjacent to billionaires never suffer any legal consequences.
My desire to demonstrate the movie’s plot holes while piloting pods of blue whales through them is an obvious indicator that I’m not the target audience for it. This type of franchise aims to bullseye hate-watchers who are too tipsy on wine coolers to care about depictions of Chernobyl-level toxic relationships or who truly don’t care and/or notice that the endeavor resembles a telenovela gone haywire. The filmmaking is inept and the vfx are inept and the writing is inept and the acting is inept and one can’t help but theorize if the whole thing is shitty by design, because it sure seems too calculated to be otherwise. But you’re probably firing up the Culpas for the sex scenes, which are tame and lame and not worth the trouble of pressing play and jamming the fast-forward button to get to the good parts. You’ve been warned!
Our Call: Culpa Tuya es muy estupido. I’m pretty sure you don’t need to look up the translation for my recommendation: OMITELO.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
