Cartel Queenpin

Film: Emilia Pérez
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

When you learn that the main actress in Emilia Pérez is transgender, you know immediately that this is a movie where you can’t really rely on the viewer reviews to get a good idea of what it’s going to be like. I guarantee that a bunch of the ½- and 1-star reviews of this film were written by people who haven’t actually seen the movie and are slagging it specifically because they don’t really know what pronouns are. Because of that, it becomes even more important to actually watch the movie carefully.

It’s also a movie where one has to be very careful in the criticism. I go into every movie hoping to like it and wanting to like it. I don’t want to spend my time watching things that I don’t like. So it’s frustrating when I don’t actually like a movie. When it’s something like Emilia Pérez, the worry is that the assumption will be that I didn’t like it because it’s largely about transgenderism, and that’s not the case. Emilia Pérez has problems that have nothing to do with the characters or the plot.

I’ll go through some of the plot quickly, not because it’s problematic but because what doesn’t work in the film is in some ways more interesting than what does. Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is a lawyer in Mexico City. She gets a call offering her a job that appears to be sketchy but also very lucrative. Unhappy where she is, she agrees to the job and takes the meeting only to find that the new client is Juan Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), a cartel kingpin better known as Manitas. And what does Manitas want? He wants to become a woman, to go through gender reassignment surgery.

So, Rita does some legwork, gets him some appointments, helps him fake his death, and transports his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez) and their kids to Switzerland. Several years later, Rita is in London and meets a woman named, well, Emilia Pérez, and eventually realizes that she is who Manitas became. Emilia has tracked Rita down because she wants her children back, and so Jessi and the kids return to Mexico to live with Emilia, who they are told was Juan’s aunt. And then, of course, complications arise, including Jessi restarting an affair she had near the end of her marriage.

The story is actually an interesting one because of how out-of-nowhere the first few minutes are. A drug kingpin deciding to undergo gender reassignment is surprising and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. There’s definitely a story here that wants to be told, and for anyone who isn’t a bigot, there’s a lot of potential here. It’s also really nice to see Zoe Saldaña doing something that feels vastly outside what she is known for. There’s a lot here that is really interesting.

So what’s the problem? The problem is the songs. How this landed two Oscar nominations for Best Song is beyond me.

This is not at all me disparaging musicals. I’ve learned to appreciate a lot of musicals—and it’s the songs that need to sell them. Most musicals don’t have the kind of depth of story that this one does, so it’s the songs that are the reason we come. With the possible exception of “El mal,” which takes place at a fundraiser, the songs in Emilia Pérez are almost entirely forgettable.

Look, the reason you go to a musical is for the music (unless you’re watching the film version of Cats, where you are watching because you are trying to open a portal to Hell). Even if I don’t love the story of a musical or find it kind of insipid, there’s almost always going to be a song or two that are worth it and that you’re going to find yourself humming the next day. I haven’t seen Wicked yet, and while there might be things about it I don’t love, I fully expect that some of the songs are going to be, as the kids these days say, bangers.

There’s virtually nothing like that in Emilia Pérez. Most of the songs are entirely forgettable, frequently sung by people who can’t really sing, and in some cases, the songs are really uncomfortable. Listening to a doctor in Bangkok singing happily about vaginoplasty is not something I had on my 2025 bingo card.

I really wanted to like Emilia Pérez. And if you get rid of the music, I do like Emilia Pérez well enough that I would recommend it. This did not need to be a musical, though, and it would have genuinely been a better movie as a drama. It would have still gotten its share of hate because people are awful, but at least that existence of the film would have made sense.

So I do need to talk a little about the awards. Zoe Saldaña was nominated for Supporting Actress and this is clear category fraud, mainly because of the desire to see Karla Sofía Gascón nominated for Best Actress, the first time a transperson has been nominated for this award. She’s good in the role and entirely believable—I haven’t seen enough 2024 movies to know if the nomination is deserved, but I probably would have nominated Saldaña instead, or at least considered it. As for the other awards I care about, I liked A Real Pain a lot more than this, and while there are some interesting choices here, it feels more like the cinematography is more noteworthy than the direction.

As a final note, Selena Gomez always looks like a child to me. Seeing her in sexual situations and talking about fuckin’ feels very pedophilic to me, but that’s probably just me.

Why to watch Emilia Pérez: If you go in blind, you’re not going to expect any of it.
Why not to watch: For a musical, the songs are all pretty much terrible.