Warning! SPOILERS for Brazen.
Netflix’s new thriller, Brazen, features a killer that calls all his victim’s “Desiree,” and the pattern reveals quite a bit about the murderer's motive. Based on the 1988 novel Brazen Virtue by bestselling writer Nora Roberts, the Netflix film stars Alyssa Milano in its title role and Sam Page as her love interest. Brazen debuted on Netflix on January 13th and quickly popped into Netflix’s highly sought-after Top 10 list, as viewers have been tuning into the Netflix Original to follow the thriller’s twists and turns.
Brazen follows Charmed’s Alyssa Milano who plays Grace, a best-selling mystery writer. Grace is called home from her book tour to provide moral support for her sister Kathleen (played by Emilie Ullerup), a high-school drama teacher in a custody battle for her son. While there, Grace meets the handsome detective, Ed (Sam Page), who lives next door, and when Kathleen is mysteriously murdered, Grace and Ed team up to try to find the killer. They discover that Kathleen was hiding a dark secret: Kathleen was a webcam dominatrix for a fantasy website—and was killed for it.
In the end, Brazen’s killer is revealed as one of Kathleen’s high school students, Jerald. Jerald doesn’t just kill Kathleen, however, as he begins stalking and killing other webcam girls, calling each of the dominatrices “Desiree” before killing them. This reveals that Jerald’s character in Brazen is seeking to kill what he sees as the women’s dark side, assigning the name “Desiree” to each of them as an identifier of their sin—that "sin" potentially being a projection of Jerald's own insecurities (i.e., his violent "desire" for these women). Not to mention that his positioning of the bodies after murdering them leans toward the idea that Jerald has a significant God complex.
Jerald is not killing the women individually, nor is he killing Kathleen—he is waging a war against what he sees as their collectively evil natures, or dark sides. Jerald’s obsession with Kathleen is not specific to her, but to what he believes her to be: a virtuous woman. After murdering her, Jerald seems to sincerely mourn Kathleen, a sign that he has psychologically separated Kathleen from her alter-ego, Desiree. When Jerald (played by Orphan: First Kill’s Matthew Finlan) kills the other women, calling each of them “Desiree,” it shows that he has dehumanized them and that he sees his battle, not against them individually, but against a greater evil akin to demonic possession.
This theory is further evidenced by Jerald positioning the bodies post-kill. Jerald’s manipulation of the women’s bodies into that of a crucified pose shows that he believed that he had returned them to their virtuous state after expelling their sinful nature—which may theoretically be a projection of Jerald's sinful nature. Thus, by killing their “Desiree,” Brazen’s Jerald has, in his eyes, purified and saved the women, acting as their savior and redeemer while concealing to himself his own evil nature.