'Kissing Game': What is the mysterious virus in Netflix's Brazilian thriller and how is it cured?
This article contains spoilers.
Netflix's Brazilian original thriller 'Kissing Game' might be slow, but the mysterious nature of its prime antagonist makes up for the many curves it takes to land the giant reveal. There's a virus spreading via kissing that a cattle ranch community's teenagers contract at a rave. There's no name for the virus, but its interworking are very quirky and unique - almost as if a dark entity possessing people, leaving them inches away from death. While just one girl dies under the virus's impact and another boy commits suicide, luckily, the rest of the teens are offered a cure in time from a local apothecarist, or cult leader if you will, who runs the venue of the rave.
After the main protagonist Fran's best friend Bel wakes up with an aching numbness in her body and a black bruise around her mouth, with her veins becoming prominent, Fran begins to suspect it was a side effect of the drug they took at the party. But regardless of the drug being the source, they all engaged in a gang kissing orgy at the party which meant Bel's illness had possibly been transmitted to everybody who kissed her, or kissed the people who kissed her, and so on. With the whole school running the risk of possible infection, soon one by one symptoms start showing, and by the time the doctors are able to discover the details of how the virus works, more than half the school is hospitalized.
In simpler terms, the virus turns people into brain dead zombie-like creatures, who are still very human and without bloodlust but have no feelings or emotions. It targets young teens too as the virus's main attack is on feelings and teens are most prone to keeping theirs suppressed. The most cynical, cold, nihilist you are, the faster it spreads. The virus makes eyes go translucent and glow in the dark along with the veins that become more and more prominent otherwise. Those affected can't feel anything -- heat, cold, pain, happiness, hunger -- nothing at all. The virus turns them into a walking shell that can recognize their loved ones but can't interact with them.
It is only through Manu's recovery that we see the first signs of combating the virus - sort of a cure that helps young people at least tackle and live a normal life under its attack. The cure, as Manu puts it, needs her to be around the fire constantly. The moment she stops feeling the heat, she has to be doused in a shallow well, propped upon the water as the cult leader drops a golden colour oil into her mouth. The oil helps her gain back her feelings and she can function like a proper human again. In that, the growing eye and darkened veins don't necessarily disappear, but the oil therapy makes them sustain under the virus, whatever its mysterious core or truth might be.
'Kissing Game' is now available for streaming, only on Netflix.