Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Dark Desire’ Season 2 on Netflix, Where Sexy Stuff And Murder Stuff Vie For Your Attention

The blood-mixed waters and sex-drenched antics of Netflix’s hit Mexican thriller Dark Desire return for a second and final season, this time laying out 15 episodes against the first season’s epic 18. Anyone who didn’t die the first time around is back for more intrigue and secrets kept, with a few new faces for added flavor. Will Alma shake her Dario trauma? Or dive back into the mirror for even more sexy trouble?  

DARK DESIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Blood clouds inside a decorative water feature, staining it red. “Julieta!” Dario Guerra (Alejandro Speitzer) crashes through the police tape. “No! No, my love! What the fuck happened?!”

The Gist: “We have to learn again to love,” Alma Solares (Maite Perroni) said as season one of Dark Desire came to a close. And yet. “Pain is perverse. It is exciting.” And as the thriller’s second and final season gets underway, Alma is living alone in Mexico City, attempting to process her post traumatic sex disorder with group therapy but still spending all day dreaming about Dario. He even appears to her in mirrors, like a murderous apparition in a horror movie. Meanwhile, Disgraced cop Esteban Solares (Erik Hayser) is released from prison, and walks out unassisted. “Where’s the cane?” asks Zoe (Regina Pavon), who is there to pick him up. Esteban’s rebuilt leg isn’t the only thing that’s changed about him. He tells Zoe he doesn’t drink anymore, and that he quit smoking; there’s also the matter of his religious conversion. At her sunny condo, Alma speaks with her estranged husband Leonardo (Jorge Poza) on the phone. He’s in Guadalajara, where his mustache and philandering ways are thriving.

With Esteban’s release, Alma recalls the events of last season, when he seemed to confess his involvement in everything from the killings swirling around Dario, her own infidelities, and even the death of her best friend Brenda (Maria Fernanda Yepes) before Leonardo ended up getting shot in the leg. There was a trial, it went bad, and now Esteban’s on the street due to “lack of evidence.” For his part, he tells Zoe, everything that happened was “for the fucking money.” And in another flashback, we revisit Esteban’s meeting with Dario underneath the Brooklyn Bridge, their heated exchange, and those stacks of cash in the attache case. 

As for Dario, he’s first seen in New York City shadowing a woman named Lys Antoine (Catherine Siachoque) before both of them appear in Mexico City, though seemingly for different reasons. Lys joins Alma’s group therapy sessions, while Dario checks into the Gran Hotel. Remember that decorative water feature with the blood in it? It’s in the background as Alma sees Dario greeting his fiancee Julieta (Ariana Saavedra) with a warm embrace.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The first season of Dark Desire was a giant hit for Netflix, putting up huge numbers in its non-English speaking categories. But let’s be real, it doesn’t matter what language Dark Desire is in, because it speaks the international language. It also joins a host of shows on the streamer that trade in the sultry, the salacious, and the oh so deliciously dramatic. Think 365 Days, What/If, Sex/Life, and Toy Boy. 

Our Take: As he was greeting his fiancee, Dario didn’t exactly hear Alma’s jaw hit the pavement. But he did catch her eye for a brief second, his features clouding over before shaking it off. If this first ep of Dark Desire season two isn’t telegraphing something awful happening to Julieta with its shouty introduction and all of that bloody water, then it’s definitely telling us that Dario and Alma aren’t at all finished with their illicit trysting. This is a show that has always relished its frequent cutaways to characters in coitus, frequently accompanied by dialogue straight out of a bodice ripping romance novel. And while that happens a couple of times here, it’s all relegated to Alma’s sexified dream life. With real life Dario in Mexico City, fiancee or not, there is absolutely going to be some real life sexifying happening between these two. The questions, of course, are how, and when, and where that will happen. But what’s assured is that Dark Desire will keep the sex spigot on high.

There are other questions. What is Lys’s relationship to Dario? We saw her running from him outside the 41 Cooper Art Gallery in New York, and then she’s suddenly in Alma’s therapy group, talking about the myth of Eros, Aphrodite’s sexy son. Did Dario and Lys have their own tryst? He’s certainly been known to get around. And if so, how does that effect Alma’s PT(sex)D? There’s also the matter of Esteban having suddenly found God, and Zoe ransacking the room she secured for him in an apparent search for evidence of some kind. The ghosts of Dark Desire season one are not resting easy here in its final go-round, and they’ve been joined by some new ghosts, too.

Sex and Skin: Alma is lost inside a tortured sex dream, her voice faltering as she says stuff like “he touches me as if he had ten hands” and the coupling on screen appears in strobe-lit flashes. Meanwhile, the wavering haunted mansion organ on the soundtrack is also being played as if with ten hands. When Dark Desire lays it on, it lays it on muy grueso. 

Parting Shot: As Alma stands with her mouth agape, Dario and Julieta, his betrothed, stroll arm in arm back into the Gran Hotel. And as they do the camera drifts across the entranceway to that water feature from the episode intro, where blood begins to cloud…

Sleeper Star: Regina Pavon’s Zoe Solares was one of Dark Desire season one’s most valuable players, and Pavon keeps her hot streak alive in the early going of season two. She’s picking up Esteban outside of jail, and totally not telling her mother. She’s getting him set up in a little rented room, then totally searching his stuff for dirt. And she’s put Dario behind her by going steady with her ride-or-die Karina (Maria de Villa), who grudgingly but willingly goes along with her girlfriend’s penchant for B & E. What else will Zoe get up to?

Most Pilot-y Line: “There is a phrase by Carl Jung that I really like,” Alma’s therapist tells her one day in the group session. “‘One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by being conscious of their darkness.’” She continues, now speaking specifically to Alma’s traumas. “Maybe if you face your own darkness, you can recover your freedom.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Call it a guilty pleasure or call it a thriller packed with deliciously rich melodrama. For the watchers, Dark Desire has all of the rewards of this kind of show, from the ogling to the conniving.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges