‘Here the Whole Time’ Review: A Brazilian Summer Romance That Knows How Heavy a Crush Can Feel

Felipe has spent years turning his own bedroom into a hiding place, and ‘Here the Whole Time’ opens right there, in the quiet after school lets out for the summer.

He is a gay teenager who has learned to disappear inside oversized shirts and locked doors, more comfortable rewatching musicals than facing the classmates who never let him forget his weight. That fragile peace collapses the moment his mother agrees to host their neighbor Caio for two weeks, a former childhood friend turned effortlessly confident gym rat who Felipe has spent years quietly aching over.

What follows never tries to disguise itself as anything other than a teen romance, and it does not need to. The film settles into its fifteen day timeline with real patience, letting the early tension between Felipe and Caio curdle into something closer to grudging familiarity before it ever becomes tenderness, and that slow burn is where the movie earns its keep.

Miguel Lallo carries Felipe with a kind of exposed nerve energy that never tips into melodrama, and it is genuinely rare to watch a young queer lead whose body is treated as simply his body rather than a problem waiting to be solved. Diego Lira gives Caio just enough armor of his own that the eventual thaw between the two boys feels earned rather than scripted, and Débora Falabella brings a warmth to Felipe’s mother that grounds the more chaotic teenage moments around her.

Where the film stumbles is in how safely it treats its own subject matter. Body image, shame, and the particular loneliness of feeling unlovable are all sitting right there in the premise, and the movie circles them with real sincerity but rarely presses down hard enough to leave a bruise, preferring warmth over friction whenever the two start to collide.

The visual language does a lot of quiet work to compensate. Sunlight pools across pool water and bedroom walls in a way that feels specific to a Brazilian summer rather than a generic streaming backdrop, and the film’s willingness to look bright and alive rather than glossy and sterile gives it a personality plenty of similar titles skip entirely.

The soundtrack leans hard into a millennial mixtape mood, stitching musical theater cues and needle drops into Felipe’s inner life so directly that his love of performance becomes a kind of second language for the film itself. It is a small choice that pays off, turning what could have been background noise into another way of understanding who this kid actually is underneath the deflecting jokes.

The ending is the one place where the film’s comfort with easy resolution becomes a real liability, wrapping up conflicts that spent an hour building complexity with a tidiness that feels more convenient than true. It is not a betrayal of the story so much as a shrug at the finish line, the kind of soft landing that undercuts some of the harder truths the film had been brave enough to raise.

Still, there is something valuable in a queer coming of age story willing to center a fat protagonist without treating his body as a plot twist waiting to be fixed by a makeover or a montage. Felipe’s arc toward liking himself matters just as much as his arc toward liking Caio, and the film seems to understand that distinction even when it does not always dramatize it with enough teeth.

Taken as a whole, ‘Here the Whole Time’ is a sweet, sun drenched summer romance that connects far more often than it fumbles, even if it occasionally chooses comfort over the harder, richer version of itself it clearly had in reach. My own reaction landed closer to genuine affection than mild approval, and I am giving it 8 out of 10.

Have you watched ‘Here the Whole Time’ yet, and did Felipe and Caio’s summer win you over as much as it won me over? Drop your take in the comments.