There are many characters and little time for their development that make up the new youth series from HBO Max Spain. Consisting of six chapters of just over 15 minutes, How to Fuck It All is much shorter overall than a Marvel film. But time constraints have never been an obstacle in cinema to achieve psychological depth in its protagonists. At least not in the good movies. And certainly not in those that belong to a genre like the road movie, which is designed to stretch a solvent arc around its heroes.
The plot begins with a group of teenagers who decide to hide from their parents that their end of year trip was canceled at the last minute, only to set off aimlessly without their knowledge. The protagonist, Alba, is a young woman who has very little to lose. So he joins the plan devised by five of the high school’s most popular students, a club he’s not a member of. She lives without parents and with her older brother’s only company, embroiled in shady affairs in which she becomes involved against her will. When he finds out that some of his classmates are going to be driving their brother’s stolen van, he manages to snag a seat in the vehicle.
The length of the episodes, the 4:3 format on a square screen and the few tricks used by those responsible make it clear that this microseries wants to be groundbreaking. To his credit, it’s actually a proposal that’s barely seen on most major platforms and TV channels. And that it doesn’t seem likely that such an alternative look will reappear on HBO Max in the medium term, after it recently decided to shut down almost all European production. Although Spain has been saved from this scorching for the time being, due to the international value of many of his series in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking United States, Spanish titles of his own creation such as Por H o por B (2020) have already disappeared from their catalogue. , in some way related to this premiere.
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The truthfulness with which How to send everything to shit reflects on the young characters falls somewhere between the implausible of Elite (Netflix) and the solvency of HIT (La 1). In its few episodes, it showcases a handful of interpersonal relationships that don’t go beyond its surface layer. The story is unduly distracted by the numerous problems that arise in this impromptu journey, almost always solved mechanically: the protagonist, more used to pulling chestnuts from the fire than the rest of her companions, finds a solution with which he continues to buy his presence in the group. Everything works much better when it comes to creating a group portrait, centered around the forms and modes of Generation Z, who have seen a series of crises of all kinds reduced their freedom during their brief existence.
The problem with this fiction created by Pablo Sanhermelando (Alba) and the actor Jaime Olías is that its pretensions travel like the young people who appear in it: aimlessly and without looking back.
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