Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Burning Betrayal’ on Netflix, a Hornier-Than-Thou Brazilian Erotic Thriller

Burning Betrayal (now on Netflix) is a Brazilian erotic thriller, and just because it’s from south of the equator doesn’t mean it’s much different from the American or Polish erotic thrillers out there. You know the ones – the ones that function only as a means to stage absurdly overstylized sex scenes featuring people who indubitably work out way more than anyone you’ve ever met. Director Diego Freitas has a fetish for dramatic lighting but significantly less control of things like tonal consistency and coherent storytelling, not that any of that matters when you’re likely tuning in for the lusty escapades.

BURNING BETRAYAL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Everything is soaked in neon green as Babi (Giovanna Lancellotti) zooms through the streets of Sao Paulo on her motorcycle with a gentleman who follows her to a location that’s part Fast and Furious hangout garage and part flame-and-steam factory from an ’80s action movie. They embrace and mash face and IT WAS ONLY A DREAM. Babi awakens at her dining room table. Dozed off. Half-full wine glass. Laptop hanging open. Sample flowers and pastries all over the table. She’s planning her wedding to Caio (Micael Borges), who comes home and pulls her clothes off and pins her to the sofa and – well, it’s all over pretty quickly, but at least he’s satisfied, right? Nothing’s ever perfect in life and sometimes we just have to accept things as they are, but in movies like this, if you can’t inspire your ladypartner to O-face until she sees eternity, you’re doomed. DOOOOMED.

Babi and Caio work together. They do… something. Import/export I think. Important people with fair amounts of disposable income in movies are always in the import/export business. Does she handle accounting? Maybe? Can’t tell for sure. She reveals she’s a business partner, though. Among the employees are her friends Patty (Camilla de Lucas), who’s never not horny as a hundred goats, and Thiago (Bruno Mantaleone), a tortoise-shell-glasses-and-polo-shirt guy and non-neon-and-motorcycles-and-leather type in a neon-and-motorcycles-and-leather world. Babi and Caio and Thiago attend an oversight hearing that has something to do with being affiliated with a criminal org masquerading as a construction company, and none of this has any real dramatic purchase in this movie, and can totally be shelved until the plot needs to rev up in the last 20 minutes. So the details of this potential legal trouble are all vague and unimportant, possibly because Babi just wasn’t satisfied by Caio’s thrust-and-moan the night before. Priorities! This is the way things are in absurd realities where sex is currency and money is just something you use to buy lingerie, expensive liquor and nights at swank hotel rooms.

Here’s the thing: The judge in charge of the hearing walks into the room all hot and dark and shiny, and he’s the guy from Babi’s dream. She sees him and all but melts right there in her chair. Marco (Leandro Lima) is his name. He takes a backseat briefly as Babi learns Caio has been cheating on her for two years, then finds herself in an ice-cream-and-wine-and-sobbing-while-she-burns-photos montage. I also think there were large slices of pie involved. But now she’s getting over it and, what with one thing and another, she ends up joining the Road Harpies Motorcycle Club (stay with me here), after suspecting that Marco is a member. And she’s right. The MC takes a road trip and on that trip she and Marco acknowledge the spark between them by letting the rest of the world burn away until nothing exists but their two naked bodies locked together at the hips, their goosepimply bums thrusting as their wet, wet mouths gasp for air. Meanwhile, Babi has a stalker and could be in all sorts of danger, but she barely notices because it’s just not important since she’s getting laid, baby!

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Burning Betrayal is 365 Days minus the gross toxicity and unintentional comedy, and Fifty Shades of Grey minus the “forbidden” kinkiness and the gross toxicity. 

Performance Worth Watching: High fives and handshakes to the editor and cinematographer who generated the film’s only laugh with that gauzy montage de scrump that illustrates the passage of time by showing us all the times the protagonist and her beau hump.

Memorable Dialogue: The Who Writes This Shit Award goes to whoever had Babi utter the immortal words, “Alexa, why was I betrayed?”

Sex and Skin: If anything less was left up to the imagination, Burning Betrayal might find a home at Pornhub. And yet somehow the film fully avoids full frontal. 

Our Take: More erotic than thrilling, and more boring than erotic, Burning Betrayal is a formulaic f—fest with all the dramatic caché of a telenovela in its creatively exhausted thousandth episode. Pry this thing apart at the seams and disassemble all the bits and pieces of its engine and you won’t find a single original idea here: Drab characters, trite situations and a marked lack of storytelling detail that all but guarantees our inability to give a single stinking crap about anything that happens here. If vagueness is a crime, to the gallows with ye, wretched movie!

As a protagonist, Babi is an empty vessel, and like everyone else in the film, more thought has been put into her wardrobe (or lack thereof; I hope the on-set body oil tech got overtime bonus pay) and hair and the furniture under her sculpted glutes (hope the personal trainers got OT pay too) than what’s happening inside her head. It’s one step away from orifice-first character construction. If she were any more shallow, cats would be drinking from her. The supporting roles are all threadbare types ranging from the wacky comic-relief bestie to smoldering men o’ mysterious morals and the blatantly obvious signs that that one character, you know the one, is the secret two-faced villain to be revealed in the film’s final suspense-free moments. But the movie doesn’t end with a sigh of relief, but a gasp of release, because the final scene is a sex scene. Like I said before, priorities. Are we titillated yet? Yeah sure why not.

Our Call: SKIP IT. This movie is junk with sex in it – I think that’s a tagged category on Netflix now. In other words, enjoy your three days in the Netflix Top 10, Burning Betrayal! You totally deserve it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.