Emilia Pérez Review: The Bold Swing That Splits the Room

The maximal gamble

Give Jacques Audiard this: no one else would have made it. Emilia Pérez welds a cartel-boss thriller to a gender-transition melodrama to an operatic musical, and the sheer nerve of the collision generates a genuine charge. When the film commits fully to its mode — a courtroom aria, a surgical-consultation duet — it achieves a delirious, sui generis energy that more cautious films never touch.

The problem of tone

But audacity is not the same as control, and the film’s register is perpetually at war with its subject. It treats gender transition as a plot device and metaphor rather than a lived reality, and it stages Mexican violence and grief with the breezy confidence of a filmmaker at a considerable remove from either. The result is a movie that can feel simultaneously earnest and glib — reaching for profundity while skating over the specifics that would earn it.

Saldaña holds the centre

Zoe Saldaña gives the film its most grounded work, a lawyer swept into a scheme she cannot control, and her committed, physical performance keeps the enterprise tethered to something human. Around her, the film’s swings connect and misfire, sometimes within the same number.

The discourse it detonated

Few recent films provoked a fiercer backlash, and much of it is warranted — the movie’s relationship to the communities it depicts is genuinely troubling. Yet its failures are the failures of overreach, not timidity, and there is something to be said for a film that refuses the safe path even when it stumbles badly on the bold one.

Verdict

Emilia Pérez is a fascinating misfire — vivid, original and tone-deaf by turns. Worth seeing to argue about, impossible to wholeheartedly endorse.