Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Through My Window 3: Looking at You’ on Netflix, the Conclusion to the Semi-Steamy Spanish Sex Saga

Through My Window 3: Looking at You (now on Netflix) at last brings the scintillating Spanish sex saga to a close. The Through My Window trilogy is a part-YA/part-softcore romance based on novels by Ariana Godoy, and the first film must’ve been enough of a hit when it was released in 2022 for Netflix to keep the rutting rolling. The cast and creative team remains consistent throughout the trilogy, so if you’ve seen the turgid first two films, you pretty much know what to expect from the third one. And so we chomp at the bit, I guess, to see if the boy named after a Greek god and the humble girl next door will live happily ever after or what. We’re all on pins and needles here, aren’t we?

THROUGH MY WINDOW 3: LOOKING AT YOU: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Three movies in, and Raquel (Clara Galle) is still sitting at her window. We’re about a minute-and-a-half in, and she’s already topless, so hooray for you horndogs out there who watch this movie for that reason. And there’s plenty of that in this movie, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Thing is, the people doing that aren’t doing that with the people we want them to. As you no doubt recall from Through My Window 2: Electric Screwaloo, Raquel and her megarich neighbor hunk Ares (Julio Pena) ain’t together no more. She’s with Gregory (Ivan Lapadula) now, and Ares is at med school in Stockholm with Vera (Andrea Chaparro), so everybody’s happy and far less dysfunctional and there’s no reason for this movie to exist, right? 

No! Of course nobody’s happy! The cruel hand of destiny put Ares and Raquel together in the first place and will surely reunite them but first we have to slog through the middle part where they’re untogether and secretly yearning for each other’s loins and hearts and cockles and other miscellaneous innards. It’s Christmastime, which means Raquel’s shitty job at a toy store requires her to dress like an elf. This is only temporary, though – remember how she wrote a book about her and Ares’ love affair called Through My Window? Well, it’s being published now, and the pre-release hype is so strong, her editor already wants a sequel. Thing is, she sits at her laptop and, just like the morning after the fateful evening when you singlehandedly ate the entire cheese log, nothing comes out. 

Well, nothing comes out until she looks out her window and sees Ares looking out his window. He’s home for Xmas break and his mere existence in the same general vicinity really gets the juices flowing – in her brain, you pervs. Well, and elsewhere too of course, because there’s no way in god’s green hell that he isn’t going to climb through her window dripping wet from the rain and relieve a little tension, ifyouknowwhatImean. But before that sex scene happens, we have to get through a different sex scene, one that cross-cuts between Raquel and Gregory having sex and Ares and Vera having sex, and what with an editing trick or two, Raquel and Ares are having sex, because that’s who each of them would rather be having sex with, and also who we’d rather be watching having sex. This, my friends, is the ART of FILM.

There’s a bunch of non-sex plot here, and I promise you’re not going to give a rip about any of it. Some of it has to do with Ares and Raquel letting their other significant others down gently. Gregory sneak-reads the beginning of Raquel’s new book and it’s all Ares this and Ares that and I wish Ares was ravishing my nethers, so that’s easy. The Vera-Ares sitch is more compleximicated, since their families’ gigantocorps are on the verge of a merge, and trust me, there’s nothing here you’ll be more invested in than the conglomeration of Alpha3 and Egarmex! If they break up, will it torpedo the deal? Pressure’s on, especially since Ares’ family’s gigantocorp has been operating in the red, much to the chagrin of his brother and CEO Artemis (Eric Masip), who’s now with the family’s former servant Claudia (Emilia Lazo), and she’s not only pregnant, but has had enough of his shitty rich entitled privileged snobby cold uncaring asshole family, so he better make decisions prioritizing her and the baby over the all-consuming globocorp drama. Oh, and there’s also that girl Anna (Carla Tous), who’s still upset about Yoshi dying oh so tragically and hilariously at the end of the last movie. Remember Yoshi? OF COURSE YOU DO. Anna has a little case of pills with her at all times, and you know what a movie character with pills is, right? Yep, an Agent of Chaos. Watch out for her! Wait, I haven’t mentioned sex-having in this entire great big long paragraph. Wanna know why? Because there’s pretty much no sex-having in the second half of the movie. You’ve been warned!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Let’s see, I referenced Twilight and Fifty Shades and 365 Days in reviews of the first two, as well as fellow Spanish teen-lust saga My Fault, Nicolas Sparks junk and YA stuff like The Fault in Our Stars. Since all three Through My Windowses are doggedly consistently dishwater-dull, I’ll hold to those comparisons. 

Performance Worth Watching: Whoever edited that dreamy dual-scrump sequence, take a bow. 

Memorable Dialogue: The gems here range from awkward metaphors (“I doubt an iceberg is capable of learning”) to generic fortune-cookie sentiments (“I’m not trying to understand love anymore. I just want to experience it”). 

Sex and Skin: Plenty! Butts ‘n’ boobs ‘n’ thighs. None of it really pushes into hard-R territory, though.

Our Take: So, is the Through My Window trilogy a comedy or tragedy? (In the Shakespearean sense, of course, because the comparison is so apt!) Of course I can’t answer that, but I can confirm that it’s just as insipid as the preceding chapters, which failed to convince us that Raquel and Ares are legit human beings who consist of more than their hair and genitals, and are passionate about writing or doctoring – or even doing the sex, because those moments are all so gauzy and flavorless, it’s like watching a kid clomp dolls together in a fit of pre-pubescent curiosity. We might be more fired up for the schtupping if we truly understood how these characters functioned, but after spending five or so hours with them, one can only come to the conclusion that there’s more air in their skulls than brains.

Even after three movies, the Raquel/Ares chemistry is akin to pouring a glass of water into another glass of water. (Pena is especially charmless; he has all the charisma of a brooding stack of wolmanized decking.) That’s one of this series’ fatal mistakes. The other is assuming we give half a rat’s hiney about any of the subplots here, which explore perfunctory dynamics between the rich-prick haves and the nice people who are the relative have-nots. If this is supposed to be some Romeo and Juliet-type star-crossed-lovers economic-caste-system saga, it’s wildly ineffective. So boil it down, and we’re just here for the hawwt stuff, and Through My Window 3 substitutes that for dazzlingly moronic manufactured third-act drama that was telegraphed an hour earlier, and still makes no sense whatsoever. Was anybody out there just dying to see how this saga concludes? Well, it’s not even amusingly bad. It’s just vapid. But at this point, we should expect nothing more.

Our Call: I don’t NEED new windows! Take me off your call list! (Violently hangs up phone) SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.