Parents' Guide to Tell Me Softly

The film leans hard into a gothic teen fantasy that borrows from Twilight, Fifty Shades of Grey, and other moody romance franchises without ever finding a style of its own. Tell Me Softly is relentlessly melodramatic and soapy, but without the self-awareness or humor that could have made it camp. Fernando Lindez spends most of the movie brooding and pouting as Thiago, while Alícia Falcó's Kami is given little to do beyond looking haunted and beautiful. Nearly everyone on-screen looks like they stepped out of a fashion campaign, which only reinforces how shallow the whole thing feels, especially when even the Di Bianco brothers' father is played by famous Spanish model Andres Velencoso.

The story drags out a secret that is painfully obvious from the first stretch of the movie, inflating what should have been a simple emotional beat into nearly two hours of overwrought, empty melodrama, and when the big reveal finally comes, it feels less like a payoff than a shrug, as if the film has just wasted everyone's time getting to something the audience already knew. What makes it even more frustrating is that none of it feels emotionally sincere, like the movie is constantly straining to hit big feelings without ever earning them, because it is clearly more invested in setting up the next two installments of a book franchise than in telling a story that stands on its own. Teens who are used to the emotional and sexual complexity of something like Euphoria will likely find this tame, predictable, and hollow, while adults will mostly see a glossy, badly acted pile of clichés that mistakes brooding looks and swelling music for actual depth.