Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine on Netflix: the painting is bait, the Duke is the mark

There is a hand that signs a contract before any face does. The hand belongs to a man who calls himself the Duke of Málaga, and the contract is for the theft of Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine. By the time the camera pulls back to show whose pen it is, the audience already knows two things the Duke does not: the panel will be touched but not taken, and the man he is hiring has already begun building a separate plan in which he is the prize. That gap — between what the Duke believes he has purchased and what he has actually walked into — is the entire engine of the season.

Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato have spent eight years training the audiences of their Money Heist universe to expect the stated plan to be wrong. Here they push the trick to its limit. The advertised target — one of only four surviving Leonardo portraits of women, on loan to Seville for the run of the season in a museum installation the show entirely fabricates — is a decoy. The actual operation is a long act of vengeance: when the Duke and his wife attempt to convert the heist into blackmail leverage, Berlin re-engineers everything around them and turns the contract into a trap baited with his own crew.

The architecture is doubled from the first episode. Every planning sequence is shot to be read twice. A whiteboard in Damián’s safe house is filmed from one angle in scenes where the gang briefs the Duke; the same whiteboard, photographed two degrees to the left in scenes where the gang briefs itself, carries one square crossed out and another square marked with a name. The viewer sees both diagrams without ever being told that what they are seeing is the same room. The architectural choice is what makes the season legible and what makes its eventual collapse cathartic, because the moment the two diagrams converge is the moment the Duke realizes he has been the canvas.

What the franchise is really doing this time is moving the camera. The Paris jewelry of 2023 was an exercise in surfaces: glass, gem, glove, the cool architecture of vaults. Seville in 2026 is built from voice and tile and shadow. Albert Pintó, David Barrocal and José Manuel Cravioto split the eight episodes between them, and you can see the shift in their hands: less ballet on a vault floor, more chase through Triana at three in the morning, more ensemble around a long table that keeps getting longer. The Real Alcázar, the Plaza de España, a riverside warehouse with a fake easel inside, a courtyard whose tile pattern aligns precisely with one frame of the heist plan — these are not backdrops but mechanisms. The city is the rig.

Pedro Alonso continues to write Berlin from the inside out, less as a character than as a register: dandyism that keeps catching on something sharp. He is given more silence here than the first season allowed, and the silences read. Tristán Ulloa’s Damián anchors the season’s moral floor; he is the man who entered the crew through love and still cannot quite bring himself to leave through it. Michelle Jenner takes Keila further into the role of the crew’s technical conscience, the one who keeps asking what happens to the painting after they have used it. Begoña Vargas’s Cameron returns louder and harder to read. Joel Sánchez’s Bruce, in a writers’ room decision that pays off three times, is given the season’s quietest comic line and the season’s loudest moral one.

The new additions matter. Inma Cuesta arrives with the precision the franchise tends to give to characters who outlast the season; she is positioned at the hinge between the gang and the Duke’s circle in a way that lets her play both rooms without losing either. Marta Nieto and José Luis García-Pérez complete the bourgeois household whose ruin the season is engineering in plain sight — Nieto as the Duchess, García-Pérez as her brother-in-law and accidental witness, both written with the specific cruelty Pina-Lobato reserve for characters who believe that money has bought them protection from consequence. The cast list is small enough to be a family and big enough to hide three traitors.

Lady with an Ermine is Leonardo’s portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, painted around 1489 for Ludovico Sforza of Milan. She has lived for two centuries in the Princes Czartoryski collection and now hangs at the National Museum in Kraków. She has never been on permanent display in Seville. The show fabricates a loan, fabricates a perimeter, fabricates a moneyed Andalusian buyer with the bad luck to want her. That fabrication is the season’s central social argument. The painting is shorthand for everything a Renaissance patron used to think he could acquire: a face, a story, the woman in the frame. Cecilia Gallerani was Ludovico’s mistress; her portrait is the record of a possession transaction conducted in oil. The Duke of Málaga, four and a half centuries later, is trying to repeat the gesture and discovering that the picture is no longer for sale on those terms. Berlin’s crew gives the audience a thief who can be told from his client only by what the thief refuses to keep.

The writers’ room has refined a technique across the years and uses it here as the season’s ethical machinery: the long monologue delivered while a heist is mid-execution, voiceover and action braided so that the speaker’s confession explains an act the audience is currently watching fail. Alonso has been the franchise’s principal vessel for this technique since 2017; here Ulloa carries one of the season’s longest, a monologue in episode six about the difference between a thief and a man who buys thieves. The technique is not decoration. It forces the audience to hear the moral argument while watching the violence and refuses the comfort of separating one from the other.

The audience contract is unusual. Pina and Martínez Lobato are not asking viewers to root for a robbery. They are asking viewers to watch a swindler dismantle the people the heist genre normally treats as victims. The first chapter of the spinoff has been retroactively retitled Berlin and the Jewels of Paris, a packaging gesture that makes the structural choice explicit: the property is no longer a numbered series but a sequence of named chapters, each chapter watchable without the previous. Where the Paris chapter closed on a love story, this one closes on a class score being settled inside a museum-shaped lie. The Spanish bourgeoisie has been a low-grade antagonist in Pina’s work since Vis a Vis. Here he writes it as the principal target.

Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine - Netflix — BLUE MONKEYS II Julio Peña as Roi, Michelle Jenner as Keila, Pedro Alonso as Berlín, Tristán Ulloa as Damián, Joel Sánchez as Bruce in episode 05 of BLUE MONKEYS II. Cr. Felipe Hernández/Netflix © 2025

What sits underneath the season — the question the work opens and refuses to close — is whether the swindler can stop short of becoming what he steals. The Lady with an Ermine looks out of her frame at her viewer with full knowledge that she has been commissioned, painted, owned, displayed. Berlin spends eight episodes building a plan whose final move is to refuse to be acquired. The season closes without telling the audience whether refusal was possible — whether the man who walked out of the Duke’s hall did so as a free thief or as a portrait already painted by the system he humiliated. The question is the show’s permanent residue, and the reason a heist series in its second chapter still earns the attention of an audience that has watched this universe for nearly a decade.

Berlin and the Lady with an Ermine premieres globally on Netflix on May 15, 2026. Eight episodes, directed by Albert Pintó, David Barrocal and José Manuel Cravioto, written by Álex Pina and Esther Martínez Lobato. The cast: Pedro Alonso, Tristán Ulloa, Michelle Jenner, Begoña Vargas, Joel Sánchez, Inma Cuesta, Marta Nieto and José Luis García-Pérez.