Summary
Desire is pretty much exactly the movie you expect it to be — tawdry, unintentionally hilarious claptrap designed to court kinky eyeballs under false pretenses.
I was going to open this review by wondering aloud why Netflix keeps commissioning movies like Desire, another in an increasingly long list of tawdry erotic thrillers in the mould established by the 50 Shades franchise and made mega-popular on streaming by stuff like 365 Days. But then I realised I already knew the answer; that, indeed, everyone knows the answer. It’s because people keep watching them.
I don’t think this says anything especially worrying. Most people are privately – and sometimes publicly – pretty sexual, especially behind closed doors, and streaming movies are designed to be consumed in the comfort of one’s own home. They’re cheap to produce because they don’t require much beyond a couple of good-looking actors and a set that resembles a bedroom, and they’re easy to watch because they don’t need to be thought about on any level beyond the obvious. We should probably retire the subgenre, since it never produces any genuinely good movies, but Netflix is never going to let us.
And thus, we have Desire, not to be confused with Dark Desire or any number of similar shows and movies with “desire” in the title. As usual, there’s a lightly forbidden romance at play, this one between a well-to-do woman and her daughter’s younger swimming coach. As usual, the salacious premise spends a while trying to pretend it’s raunchier than it is, excusing some extended but chastely shot sex scenes, and then in the third act everything goes a bit laughably bonkers. You know the drill by now.
Lucero (Ludwika Paleta) and Fernando (José María Yazpik) are, on paper, happily married. They’ve been together ages and are held aloft in the local community as a picture of healthy marital bliss. The problem is that privately they lead a mundane sexless life, and both are openly considering introducing third parties into the bedroom without daring to be the first one to say it out loud. This opens the door for Lucero to pursue a taboo liaison with Matias (Óscar Casas), the new swimming coach of their daughter, Viviana (Pilar Pascual).
Director Teresa Simone does a half-decent job of establishing the fundamentals of this premise. You sort of buy it. There’s nothing unusual about a man who looks like Matias being attracted to a woman who looks like Lucero, any age gap notwithstanding (there are 20 years between them, but when the youngest of the two is nearly 30, and the oldest looks at least ten years younger than she is, I’m not sure the whole thing is quite as salacious as the movie would like). Naturally, though, this is only the start of Lucero’s – and indeed the movie’s – problems.
I won’t spoil anything, since part of the fun of Desire – frankly, the only fun of Desire – is seeing how determinedly stupid it becomes as it goes. Suffice it to say, there’s a death, a complete reframing of the narrative we think we’re watching, and a bit more besides, including a “happy” ending if you interpret “happy” as “emotionally and morally bankrupt”. Simone fares less well handling these latter portions, which can’t lean on the sexy framing as much and need to function as a proper thriller. The only spoiler I’ll provide is that they don’t. At all.
The performances are game, if nothing else, especially Paleta, who is burdened with most of the dramatic heavy lifting. Casas’s Matias starts out strong but shifts into a desperate, whiny mode that doesn’t suit him. Fernando kind of drifts in and out of the narrative as and when, but he’s believable in spurts, and Pascual is fine as a pretty, naïve young girl who doesn’t know any better. Hilariously, Lucero and Fernando have a son who, on two separate occasions, I completely forgot existed, which is a bit worrying considering he’s kind of crucial to the plot (albeit in ways that don’t make a great deal of sense).
Movies like Desire operate on the basis of enticing kinky viewers with promises of NSFW sex scenes, of which there are only a couple here, and nothing you haven’t seen before. None of the myriad imitators of 365 Days have ever managed to get close to that movie’s genuine sensationalism, and the efforts are starting to feel a bit embarrassingly half-hearted. When a bit of skin is your primary selling point, and even that’s improperly done, you know you’ve got a dud on your hands. Unless there’s a teeming market for very long, awkward silences that I don’t know about, I can’t imagine this movie making any kind of splash. And that’s assuming anyone can see it, given how underlit it all is. Perhaps they should have called this one Dark Desire after all.
