Tell Me Softly

The Ghost of First Kisses

There’s a weird weight to people who knew you before you learned how you were “supposed” to be. They remember the sloppy, unfiltered version of you. So when they show back up, they don’t just re-enter your life—they rearrange it. That’s the force driving *Tell Me Softly* (adapted from Mercedes Ron’s hit Spanish YA novel *Dímelo bajito*). Kamila Hamilton has spent seven years burying her chaotic adolescence under good grades and a carefully managed reputation in her coastal Galician town. Then the Di Bianco brothers return.



I wouldn’t have pegged the director of *La influencia*—a full-on horror movie—as the guy to helm a teen romance, but Denis Rovira van Boekholt’s background actually explains a lot. He doesn’t frame the love triangle as something sunlit and wistful. He shoots it like it’s haunted. The camera hangs around the dark edges of locker rooms and along those windswept cliffs. The light stays chilly. (It also kind of flatters the material, nudging you into thinking the script has more going on than it does.)

When Thiago (Fernando Lindez) and Taylor (Diego Vidales) step back into Kami’s world, Rovira films it with the nerves of a jump scare waiting to happen. Take the early scene where Kami’s toxic ex corners her in the boys' locker room. The fluorescent lighting looks sickly. Dani crowds her, all sharp angles and entitlement. Then Taylor steps in. And instead of underscoring a big “hero moment,” the camera drops to catch something quick and telling: matching triangle-shaped scars on Taylor and Kami’s wrists. Shared trauma, communicated in one glance. No speech required, and thankfully the movie doesn’t force one there.



That kind of restraint doesn’t last. Once the pieces are in place, the film starts shouting. Lindez—leaning into the brooding bad-boy mode he sharpened on *Élite*—plays Thiago with his jaw basically welded shut. He’s pure unresolved rage and toxic pull, the guy who stole Kami’s first kiss and seems to think feelings only count if something gets broken. Vidales gives Taylor a gentler presence, but the script still locks both brothers into the same loop: glare, argue, repeat. *Cinemanía* critic Enid Román Almansa put it perfectly when she said "it insists on saying the same thing, over and over again, convinced that turning up the volume is enough."

Still, Alícia Falcó keeps the whole thing from tipping over. She’s a formally trained dramatic actress, and she brings real physical awareness to Kami. Watch what happens to her shoulders. When Kami is performing “perfect student,” she holds herself like she’s being inspected—tight, precise, almost military. The second either brother enters the scene, that posture caves in. She visibly deflates. It sells the loss of control more convincingly than most of the dialogue, and her face keeps ratting out the story even when her lines can’t.



Whether you can roll with the movie’s clunkier choices mostly comes down to how much you enjoy the genre’s machinery. There’s plenty of intimacy, but it often feels weirdly airless. Catherine Bray in *The Guardian* had it right: the film's "attitude to sex proves something of a curate's egg: it's spicier than most American teen movies, but falls short of offering anything more than titillation." The camera is right there, yet it rarely feels candid. Lots of skin, not much sense of two people actually trying to read each other.

I keep thinking about the version of *Tell Me Softly* that trusted its quieter beats instead of reaching for another screaming match. Under all the noise is something painfully relatable: you don’t really outrun your past, because your past is often just a person who knows exactly where your heart bruises. The film builds a gorgeous, moody stage for that idea—even if, eventually, it forgets to let the actors simply stand on it and breathe.