Desire on Netflix — Teresa Simone’s erotic thriller builds from water, glass, and who holds the gaze

Lucero’s life has the correct dimensions from outside: a large quiet house, a stable marriage, children moving through rooms arranged for admiration rather than living. The setup of Teresa Simone’s debut feature looks like familiar erotic thriller territory — a lawyer, a husband, a swimming coach hired for the kids. What makes Desire different is where the camera stands. Not watching a woman lose control. Watching a woman make a choice.

The affair begins at the edge of a lit pool — the same space where someone could be observed from inside the house. Ludwika Paleta plays Lucero as a person who has already decided before anything visible happens. Her husband Fernando, played by José María Yázpik, brings Matías — played by Óscar Casas — into the household as a swimming coach, and the film presents this as an arrangement set in motion by the man who doesn’t yet understand what he’s started. The desire is filmed from Lucero’s angle rather than staged for a neutral external eye, and that reorganization gives the film its character: cool, measured, in control of itself.

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Teresa Simone and screenwriters Giulia Cardamone and Vanessa Miklos build the film around water, glass, and reflection. Dialogue is spare. A marriage is characterized by the way two people occupy the same kitchen without speaking. Óscar Casas gives Matías just enough surface to be a plausible object of projection — less a character than a container for what Lucero needs him to be. José María Yázpik gives Fernando the particular blindness of a man who mistakes authority for knowledge, which is why he hires the instrument of his own undoing.

The mid-film move shifts everything. The danger doesn’t arrive through the husband discovering something. It enters through the daughter: Viviana, played by Pilar Pascual, who gravitates toward Matías and transforms a private arrangement into something running through the whole household. From that point Desire stops being about seduction and starts functioning as containment. Rooms built for observation now have to hide something. The film’s closed system — pool, glass, reflection — begins absorbing what it helped create.

The ending refuses resolution, which is the only honest position. When a mother and daughter have wanted the same person inside the same house, no third act can restore what existed before. The restrained visual register that made the opening feel charged makes the close feel cold — and that’s exactly right for a film that has been about temperature from its first frame.

Teresa Simone’s Desire reached Netflix on 17 July 2026 after theatrical releases in Mexico (7 May) and Spain (8 May). Running 97 minutes, produced by Pablo Cruz for El Estudio, the film reached the top spot in 67 countries within two days of arriving on the platform. The cast includes Ludwika Paleta, Óscar Casas, José María Yázpik, Pilar Pascual, Leonardo Ortizgris, Matías Coronado, Gabriela Zamora, and Jaydy Michel. A controlled debut from a first-time director more interested in the household the affair opens up than in the affair itself.

Cast

Tags: Netflix, Óscar Casas, Desire, Ludwika Paleta, Teresa Simone

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