Drawn Together is exactly what it looks on its surface: Attractive people move through a contrived web of plausibilities until they arrive at love. One could also just refer to it as a Spanish thriller version of the 1990s’ mega hit The Bodyguard starring Kevin Costner and Whitney Houston with a little bit of the modern, sexier romances like 50 Shades of Grey added for extra flavour.
The steamy film stars Ester Expósito and Hugo Diego Garcia, and they absolutely crush it. The two are made for roles like this. The actors seize upon the parts and perform them with the kind of game-readiness necessary for a silly film like this one to have some life.
Expósito is Marfil, a young, attractive, socialite daughter of a business magnate. One day, she’s kidnapped. Just as mysteriously, she’s returned. She has a case of amnesia and can’t remember her experience of the time she was gone. All she knows is what she’s been told by her distant wealthy father and the people he hired to surround her. She is a modern Disney princess drawn back into her castle by her guardian, with the draw bridge firmly closed.
Part of this new narrow life is the constant presence of bodyguards, one of whom the father assigns to Marfil. His name is Sebastián and he is, of course, brooding and hot.
Marfil finds all of the protection stifling. It’s not that she particularly dislikes any of the people put in charge of guarding her–she just hates the situation enough that she must express it. There’s no outlet other than the walking targets in front of her. She therefore seizes upon Sebastián as a kind of punching bag; however, Sebastián is no passive receiver, and she begins to like that about him.
It doesn’t take long before there are lustful, drawn out glances between them. The friction becomes hot quickly and soon Marfil can’t resist it. Even she is occasionally aware she’s fallen into a bit of a cliché.
Mysterious threats continue to occur, forcing Sebastián and Marfil to draw closer together, in more enclosed spaces. The close calls make sparks fly.
All of this threatens to blow up in the faces of Marfil and Sebastián, as well as in the face of her father.
On paper, it is an exciting if not fully baked plot idea. There’s a lot to like in the way that TV movies from the mid-2000s and earlier are charming in their own way. But the reason they succeed in retrospect is because we view them with — perhaps unfairly, but to their ultimate benefit — at first contempt and then begrudging respect. They succed in what they try to be: soap opera movies.
Drawn Together, unfortunately, does not benefit from this perspective. It is a solid C-grade movie made better by the lead actors understanding the kind of movie they’re in: one that should titillate the audience if it won’t actually satisfy them cinematically.
Drawn Together is now streaming on Prime Video.
