There’s a very simple and obvious formula for a movie like Bad Influence, which shouldn’t be confused with Bad Influence: The Dark Side of Kidfluencing, a docuseries also from 2025 and also streaming on Netflix that has very different subject matter. Writer-director Chloé Wallace’s film is a simpler, less contentious affair, a generic teenage romantic drama with picturesque landscapes and erotic undertones, playing the usual beats for the typical audience. At least until an impressively rubbish ending that arguably undermines the whole thing, including the bits that work.
But about that formula. It’s this: You cast two young actors who are very easy on the eye, in this case Alberto Olmo and Eléa Rochera, and you spend half the runtime letting them fall in ill-advised love. The characters are from radically different backgrounds, of course. They shouldn’t get together. But you know they will, and the big payoff is when they eventually have a tender and tastefully-framed sex scene. Olmo does a lot of smoldering. Rochera often giggles when her friends accuse her of fancying him. You get the idea.
For the most part, Bad Influence works perfectly well here. There’s little to get wrong, and the important details—the general attractiveness of the leads and their chemistry with one another—are accounted for. It’s everything else that’s the problem, since the whole thing is wrapped up in a mystery plot with a bonkers payoff that makes one wonder why they bothered. Let me explain.
The plot hook here is that Eros (Olmo), an ex-con from the wrong side of the tracks, is hired by his kind-of mentor, Bruce (Enrique Arce), to work as a bodyguard for his ballerina daughter, Reese (Rochera). Reese has a stalker whose behaviour is becoming increasingly sinister, and Bruce tends to just throw money at his problems until they go away. Since Eros needs a job, the arrangement makes sense, even if it’s a terrible idea to force two horny youngsters into extremely close proximity and expect them not to fall for each other.
The matter of Reese’s stalker forms a sort of “whodunit” aspect to the narrative. Eros also has a secretive backstory, and he and his friends, Diego (Farid Bechara) and Peyton (Mirela Balic), are all trying to drum up enough money to save Diego’s little brother Simon from the foster system. But don’t worry too much about this plot because Bad Influence forgets about it midway through.
Reese’s cartoonishly awful ex, Raul (Fernando Fraga), seems like a shoo-in for the stalker, but it’s obviously a red herring. None of this really works. The plot is mostly an excuse for Eros and Reese to be brought closer together, and you can tell because nobody reacts appropriately to any of the stalking stuff. At one point, Reese’s window is broken, and it’s never mentioned again, and later she’s sent a macabre package that still doesn’t compel her father to keep her where he can see her. Nobody does anything that makes any sense on a human level.
In most erotic dramas like this, common sense wouldn’t matter, but there’s so much focus on the mystery plot that a part of me thinks that was supposed to be the selling point, especially because the sex stuff is really chaste. This isn’t, say, 365 Days, where you’re pretending to be invested in the narrative of what is essentially softcore pornography. Bad Influence is masquerading as a proper movie. And it’s incredibly wanting in that regard.
The performances are serviceable, and the landscapes are lovely, which is perhaps the most charitable I can be. The leads have real chemistry, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see either of them again, hopefully in a slightly better project that asks more of them. But Bad Influence is a strange misfire that isn’t sure what kind of movie it wants to be or how to properly conclude the one it eventually becomes.