Matías takes a job coaching at a swimming club, and his employer offers him a second one on the side. Fernando will pay him to sleep with Fernando's wife and send back video of it. Matías takes that job too. Desire, the Mexican thriller that landed on Netflix on July 17 and went straight to number one on the US movie chart, sells itself as the story of a woman who risks her whole life on an affair. The affair had been arranged before she ever walked into it. Here is who killed Matías, what Fernando was actually buying, and how four people share a drowning and walk away from it.
The Job Matías Was Hired to Do
Fernando (José María Yazpik, familiar to Netflix viewers as the cartel boss in Narcos: Mexico) and Lucero (Ludwika Paleta) own the swimming club together and look, from a distance, like a couple who finished building their life years ago. She is a successful lawyer. He is calm, attentive, easy to be around. What the marriage no longer has is any heat in it, and Lucero is the one who says so, suggesting they let someone else into the bedroom. Fernando agrees, then goes considerably further than she knows. He hires Matías (Óscar Casas), the young coach he has just brought onto the staff, and attaches a price to the arrangement: be with my wife, and record it for me. Lucero thinks she is doing something reckless and her own. She is walking into a room that was furnished for her in advance, the way another recent thriller sent a young outsider into a wealthy family's house that already had plans for her.
Where It Stops Being a Performance
Matías does what he was paid to do, and then he wrecks the whole arrangement by meaning it. He falls for Lucero. When a blackmail threat surfaces around a case she is handling, she moves to end things, and he refuses to let it end. He tells her what her husband has been paying him for, which turns her revulsion toward Fernando without sending her back to Matías. Exposing the arrangement would cost Fernando the club and Lucero her practice, and he says as much. Then he reaches for the last pressure point available to him and starts dating Viviana (Pili Pascual), Lucero's teenage daughter, where her mother has to watch. It is the ugliest thing he does and also the most legible: a young man out of leverage, grabbing the one thing this family still guards.
Who Killed Matías
All four of them, in sequence, over the course of one night.
Julián, Lucero's younger son, drops sedatives into Matías's water bottle during a visit to the house. Later, at the club, Viviana goes through his phone while the drugs are taking hold and finds the messages about her mother. She shoves him, and he goes down with a head injury. Fernando turns up, sees him on the ground, and kicks him in the face. Lucero arrives last, finds him in the water, and holds him under until he stops. In her own mind she is protecting her family. She is also the fourth person that night to decide he mattered less than the household did.
How the Family Gets Away With It
The sedatives do the covering. Because Matías already had a body full of drugs before anyone laid a hand on him, the death is written up as an overdose. The club's security footage is destroyed, nobody in the house contradicts anybody else, and the file closes. It is the aftermath that I keep turning over. The marriage recovers. The heat Lucero went outside the house to find comes back into it, and what restores it is not the affair at all but the killing, the first thing this family ever finished together. Another recent thriller closed ranks the same way around a mother hiding a death, except that one let the truth come out in the end.
Is Desire Worth Watching
By the measures reviewers tend to use, Desire is not a good film, and I follow most of the complaints. It is overheated. Its erotic scenes play more solemn than charged. Teresa Simone, directing her first feature, keeps reaching for a ripple or a reflection in a moment when holding on someone's face would have carried more. Where I part from the reviews is on the premise, which is meaner and smarter than the glossy packaging suggests. This is a film about a woman who thinks she has finally chosen something for herself, in a house where her husband has quietly priced and scheduled the choice. It played Mexican theaters back in May, and I suspect it works better the way most people are meeting it now, alone and late. Watch it for the last twenty minutes, which are hard to sit through in the right way. What I took away was smaller and colder than the plot. Every person who survives this story is someone capable of producing a feeling on request. The one who could not do that is the one they left in the water.