The Premise
"Final Project" is a Mexican micro-series that dropped on Netflix on July 29, 2026. Ten-minute episodes, teen thriller wrapper, cyberbullying at the center. Isabella Tena plays Tamara, a quiet goth kid who transfers schools trying to leave a bad chapter behind. Her assignment is a documentary, and she picks cyberbullying as her topic. Almost immediately an anonymous account starts targeting her, and the early episodes set up that whoever's behind it is sitting in her classroom. That's the setup: a girl filming a problem while the problem is filming her back.
The Case For
Isabella Tena is doing real work here. She plays Tamara with a watchful stillness that's more interesting than the writing around her, and when she's on screen alone the show briefly looks like it knows what it's about. The micro-episode format is the other honest choice. Ten-minute chapters keep the thing moving, and a couple of the phone-screen sequences have a genuine crawling-skin quality when the direction remembers to let silence do the work. If you want a very short teen thriller you can knock out on a bus ride, the runtime is doing you a favor.
The Case Against
The scripts don't trust the audience for a second. Characters announce their feelings, explain the theme back to each other, and pause the story so someone can deliver a small speech about what social media does to teenagers. The thriller mechanics are thin. Clues arrive when the plot needs them, red herrings show up wearing name tags, and the supporting cast reads more like a chart of archetypes than a class of kids. The ten-minute chapters that help pacing hurt everything else, so relationships don't breathe and the reveals land without weight.
Who It's For, Who'll Bounce
If you were the target audience for early "Elite," or you'll watch anything in the "Baby"/"Control Z" lane and forgive a lot for a good-looking cast and a phone-screen aesthetic, you'll get through this in an afternoon and not feel robbed. Anyone who wants their thrillers to actually thrill, or who needs characters to behave like people instead of position papers, is checking out by episode two. Fans of "Adolescence" or "13 Reasons Why" at its most serious will find this one thin by comparison. Casual Netflix scrollers looking for background noise while folding laundry can do worse.
The Ruling
SLOP is right because the show keeps interrupting itself to make sure you got the message. Cyberbullying is the subject, the plot, the dialogue, and the moral, and the writers never trust any of those layers to carry the point alone, so everything gets said twice. That's the Lecture Test failing on craft grounds. The theme is fine. The delivery is a PSA in a hoodie. Direction is competent but anonymous, the mystery is mechanical, and Tena's performance is stranded in a script that would rather be agreed with than watched. Ambition was low, execution matched. Skip it.
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