Movies like Private Desert (2021)
The best movies like Private Desert (2021) are Toll (2023), Araby (2018) and Mars One (2022). If Private Desert hooked you with its drama, these 30 similar films are what to watch next, and every pick says why it matches.
Quick picks
- Highest ratedThe Second Mother (2015)8.0/10 from 808 votes
- NewestThe Son of a Thousand Men (2025)Released 2025
Toll (2023)
Suellen is a toll booth attendant who starts using her job to help a gang of thieves steal watches from people driving to the coast. But only for a noble cause: to send her son to an expensive gay conversion workshop.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Araby (2018)
André, a teenager, lives in an industrial town in Brazil near an old aluminum factory. One day, a factory worker, Cristiano, suffers an accident. Asked to go to Cristiano’s house to pick up clothes and documents, André stumbles on a notebook, and it’s here that Araby begins — or, rather, transforms. As André reads from the journal entries, we are plunged into Cristiano’s life, into stories of his wanderings, adventures, and loves.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisMars One (2022)
A middle-class Black family in Brazil copes with the election of a far-right extremist president. The mother believes that she's cursed after an unexpected encounter, while her husband puts all of his hopes into their son's soccer career.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisGood Luck (2014)
After several behavior problems, teenager John is admitted to a psychiatric clinic by his family. There he meets Judith, for who he soon falls in love. The problem is that she does not have long to live and they know it. This shall not prevent the emergence of a great romance in the clinic.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisRoma (2018)
In 1970s Mexico City, two domestic workers help a mother of four while her husband is away for an extended period of time.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Seamstress (2017)
In the thirties, two sisters separated by fate face prejudice and sexism, one by the high society in a big city and the other by a group of renegades in the countryside. Despite the distance, they know that they can only count on each other and both of them will assert themselves in their own and surprising way.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSocrates (2018)
After his mother's sudden death, Socrates, a 15-year-old living on the margins of São Paulo's coast, must survive on his own while coming to terms with his grief.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Second Mother (2015)
After leaving her daughter Jessica in a small town in Pernambuco to be raised by relatives, Val spends the next 13 years working as a nanny to Fabinho in São Paulo. She has financial stability but has to live with the guilt of having not raised Jessica herself. As Fabinho’s university entrance exams approach, Jessica reappears in her life and seems to want to give her mother a second chance. However, Jessica has not been raised to be a servant and her very existence will turn Val’s routine on its head. With precision and humour, the subtle and powerful forces that keep rigid class structures in place and how the youth may just be the ones to shake it all up.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisThe Son of a Thousand Men (2025)
In a small village, a lonely fisherman yearning for a son is drawn to an ethereal light that links him to others and their long-buried secrets.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisSo Hard to Forget (2010)
Julia is a 35-year-old English Literature teacher struggling with depression as she tries to get her life back together again after her long, intense love affair with Antonia. Feeling totally abandoned after she and her enigmatic girlfriend broke up, Julia is thrown into a desperate, painful process. Her life and her values have been tinged with unbearable melancholy and her life's measure seems reduced to out-of-focus fragments of her memories. Her inner turmoil and conflicts hamper a process now made necessary - that of readapting to her new life. It is impossible for her to disguise her pain when she attempts to narrate emotions.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
I'd Receive the Worst News from Your Beautiful Lips (2011)
In a remote part of the Amazon, a traveling photographer has an intense affair with a preacher's wife, but secrets from her past threaten to ruin them both.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Divine Love (2019)
In 2027 Brazil, civil servant Joana mainly deals with divorce cases. As a member of a branch of evangelical Christians known as the Divino Amor group, she uses her position to offer a kind of physical therapy to couples who want to separate. Although Joana and her husband Danilo regularly consummate their marriage, neither her constant prayers nor any other methods of assistance seem to be able to fulfill their desire for a child.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisLong Way Home (2019)
In order to take a new job as an employee in the public sanitation department, Juliana moves from the inner city of Itaúna to the metropolitan town of Contagem in Brazil. While waiting for her husband to join her, she adapts to her new life, meeting people and discovering new horizons, trying to overcome her past.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisAquarius (2016)
Clara, a vibrant former music critic and widow with flowing tresses is the only remaining apartment owner in a beautiful older building targeted for demolition by ruthless luxury high-rise developers. Clara proves to be a force to be reckoned with as she thwarts the builders plans to kick her out of the apartment.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisLoveling (2018)
On the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, Irene has only a few days to overcome her anxiety and renew her strength before sending her eldest son out into the world.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisCasa Grande (2014)
As a privileged teenager living in an affluent suburb of Rio de Janeiro, Jean has little to worry about beyond games, grades and girls. But as his overbearing father drags the family into debt, Jean is forced into a change of lifestyle which opens his eyes to the world beyond his 'casa grande' - not least that of the feisty, mixed-race firecracker Luiza. Cultures, classes and generations collide in this engrossing coming-of-age drama from Brazil.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe House of Sand (2005)
A woman is taken along with her mother in 1910 to a far-away desert by her husband, and after his passing, is forced to spend the next 59 years of her life hopelessly trying to escape it.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCity of Men (2007)
Best buddies Acerola and Laranjinha, about to turn 18, discover things about their missing fathers' pasts which will shatter their solid friendship, in the middle of a war between rival drug gangs from Rio's favelas.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisPacarrete (2019)
Russas, a small town in northeastern Brazil, is the home of Pacarrete, a grumpy retired dance teacher who dreams of getting a big shot and starring at a dance spectacle for the whole town to see. She's close to fulfilling that dream, but not without overcoming a few impediments along the way.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Gabriel and the Mountain (2017)
Before entering a prestigious American university, Gabriel Buchmann decides to travel the world for one year. After ten months on the road with his backpack full of dreams, immersed at the heart of various countries, he arrives in Kenya determined to discover the African continent. Until he reaches the top of Mount Mulanje, Malawi, his final destination.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisThe Year My Parents Went on Vacation (2006)
A boy is left alone in a Jewish neighborhood in the year of 1970, where both world cup and dictatorship happen in Brazil.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisUnder the Skin (2013)
Man and Woman are reunited after a long time. Sorrow and desire cannot break the silence. But that's okay: when words don't come, it's the body that speaks.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Manas (2025)
Thirteen-year-old Marcielle lives on Marajó Island in the heart of the Amazon rainforest. To break a terrible cycle that imprisons the women around her in an isolated region, she must do the impossible to liberate herself and her younger sister from a dark abyss of silence held by her own family.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Absolute CinemaMovies like thisTattoo (2013)
Paulete, the star of a daring theater group, is visited by his military brother-in-law, the young Fininha. A torrid relationship arises between the two, and now the soldier must deal with the prevailing repression during the Brazilian military dictatorship.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisNomadland (2021)
A woman in her sixties embarks on a journey through the western United States after losing everything in the Great Recession, living as a van-dwelling modern-day nomad.
Why it matches: Fans watch both · both drama
Worth the HypeMovies like thisThe Guilty (2021)
A demoted police officer assigned to a call dispatch desk is conflicted when he receives an emergency phone call from a kidnapped woman.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisIn Too Deep (1999)
Drug lord Dwayne Gittens rules Cincinnati with an iron fist. No wonder he's known as "God" on the streets. Determined to break Gittens' stranglehold on the city is undercover cop Jeffrey Cole. But as Cole takes on an assumed identity to penetrate Gittens' criminal empire, he makes a disturbing discovery -- he kind of likes being a gangster.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisJesse Stone: Thin Ice (2009)
Jesse Stone and Captain Healy are shot during an unauthorized stake-out in Boston. Meanwhile, a cryptic letter sent from Paradise leads the mother of a kidnapped child to Stone. Though her son was declared dead, she hopes he will reopen the case.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisJesse Stone: No Remorse (2010)
Police Chief Jesse Stone, who was suspended by the Paradise, Mass. Town Council, begins moonlighting for his friend, State Homicide Commander Healy, by investigating a series of murders in Boston, leaving Rose and Suitcase to handle a crime spree in Paradise on their own. Jesse pours his energy into his work in an effort to push away his twin demons: booze and women. When his investigation leads to notorious mob boss Gino Fish, Jesse's pursuit becomes hazardous.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
Popcorn FlickMovies like thisCrimes of Passion (1984)
Fashion designer Joanna Crane leads a double life. By night she is China Blue, a prostitute who's attracted the attention of a sexually frustrated private detective, and a psychopathic priest in possession of a murderous sex toy.
Why it matches: Recommended by TMDB viewers · both drama
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Frequently asked questions
What are the best movies like Private Desert?
The closest matches to Private Desert are Toll (2023), Araby (2018) and Mars One (2022). Below are 27 more, each with the reason it matches.
What should I watch after Private Desert?
People who watched Private Desert most often go on to Toll (2023), Araby (2018) and Mars One (2022).
What is the highest-rated movie like Private Desert?
The Second Mother (2015), rated 8.0/10 by 808 TMDB users.
What is the newest movie like Private Desert?
The Son of a Thousand Men (2025) is the most recent release on this list.
How are movies similar to Private Desert chosen?
First come films that Trakt’s viewers watch alongside Private Desert, then TMDB’s recommendations and films it rates as similar in story and genre. Each pick says which signal put it there.