REVIEW: ‘Love At First Kiss’ Can’t Fully See What It’s Got

Love at First Kiss (Eres Tú) is a Spanish-language Netflix Orignal romance from director Alauda Ruiz de Azúa and writers Adolfo Valor and Cristóbal Garrido. Javier (Álvaro Cervantes) discovered when he was a teenager that whenever he kisses somebody for the first time, he can see their whole future together in that instant. It’s never easy, seeing the future. While Javier hopes that it will help him be certain he’s found his soulmate when the right person finally comes around, it also leaves him miserable, as he knows that every relationship he’ll be in until then will be doomed to fail.

I find the concept of Love at First Kiss absolutely fascinating and entirely exciting. I can’t say I know of any other romance that goes about a sci-fi concept quite like this. Javier isn’t quite traveling to the future, or even necessarily going out of his way to try and influence it. He’s merely captive in a situation that can bring him both a great sense of certainty and cause him an utter lack of meaning. I love the way the movie uses little montages to show the future with every kiss and how they juxtapose a particularly dark, empty moment later in the film.

Unfortunately, though, I don’t think Love at First Kiss maximizes its plot device’s potential, leaving me with a feeling that the movie was fine, but not nearly as satisfying as its promise left me anticipating. The main reason is Javier himself. First, he’s just so incredibly dull. He owns a small, struggling book publisher, an absolute romance goldmine, and yet, he has virtually no charm and every single scene directly entangling his business and his love life, except maybe for one, is rather negative. I want to like him, I’ve liked Cervantes in his previous Netflix rom-com Crazy About Her. But here, he’s just a dull man who lacks personality, struggles to convince me he ever is learning or growing, mopes too much, and offers no buyable connection with his romantic costar, Lucía (Silvia Alonso).

Lucía and Javier come into each others’ lives first via Javier’s best friendship with Lucía’s partner, Roberto (Gorka Otxoa). While my interest in these two’s success romantically is minimal, the dynamic at play between them and Roberto actually is more interesting, and perhaps even better written and depicted ultimately, than the romance at the center of the movie. There’s a movie-long plot regarding their relationships with one another that by its end felt refreshing and satisfying, perhaps because, unlike Javier and Lucía’s kiss-foretold future, this part was totally unexpected.

Equally unexpected and maybe even the most satisfying of all is Love at First Kiss’s fourth main character, played by Susana Abaitua. She’s the most alive member of the entire cast for most of the movie, which feels both intentional to a degree (her hair is literally purple) and like an inadvertent sin. It’s hard to watch a whole rom-com where there’s more connection and excitement between two other characters than there is between the main ones. But Abaitua really brings the most to the movie. I’m perhaps a bit biased by the fact that she plays opposite Cervantes’ characters in Crazy About Her and they show much stronger chemistry there than Cervantes and Alonso do here, but every scene with Abaitua just instantly becomes the most interesting and exciting, for better and worse.

She’s even involved in a whole sub-plot that honestly, feels like it adds nothing to the main plot or Javier’s character growth, but for the chances to keep seeing Abaitua at play, I don’t care what it does or doesn’t add. I’m ready for Abaitua to just be the main character and focal point of her own romance. I think she’d bring some spark to a genre that Netflix repeatedly has trouble finding excitement in.

Love at First Kiss has a main character problem, which makes it hard for its creative sci-fi element to reach its full narrative or emotional potential. But, its side characters and plots nearly make up for it, especially where Susana Abaitua is concerned.

Love at First Kiss is streaming on Netflix March 3rd.

Jason Flatt

Jason is the Sr. Editor at But Why Tho? and producer of the But Why Tho? Podcast. He’s usually writing about foreign films, Jewish media, and summer camp.