Emilia Pérez (2024) Review: A Bold, Broken Cartel Musical

Is Emilia Pérez worth watching?

It depends on your tolerance for glorious messes. Emilia Pérez is one of the most audacious films of 2024, a crime thriller, trans melodrama and musical fused into one, and it is as often clumsy as it is thrilling. Zoe Saldaña’s committed performance and a few electric musical numbers give it real life. Against that, its treatment of gender transition and of Mexico’s violence is glib enough to have made it one of the most contested films of its year, and much of that criticism is fair.

What is Emilia Pérez about?

Rita (Zoe Saldaña) is a sharp but overlooked lawyer in Mexico City, stuck defending guilty men for a firm that takes her for granted. She is approached with an extraordinary job: a feared cartel boss, known as Manitas, wants her help to disappear completely, fake a death and undergo gender-affirming surgery to live at last as a woman. The job pays well enough to change Rita’s life. Years later, the woman who emerges, Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), seeks Rita out again, determined to reconnect with the family she left behind and to make amends for the violence of her past.

Selena Gomez plays Manitas’s wife, and Adriana Paz appears in a key supporting role. Emilia Pérez is directed by the French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, loosely based on a novel and on Audiard’s own idea for an opera. It is a French production in Spanish, runs 132 minutes, and won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2024.

When the music takes over

The film is at its best when it commits to being a musical. Audiard stages songs as heightened, almost operatic interruptions of the thriller plot, and the best of them have an eccentric charge: a number in which Rita confronts the hypocrisy of the powerful, or a consultation with a surgeon that is half comedy, half confession. The music, written by Clément Ducol and Camille, favours spoken rhythm and chant over conventional melody, which gives the film a strange, hypnotic texture.

The trouble is consistency. Some numbers feel essential; others are flat or awkwardly performed, and the film never settles on how seriously it wants its musical mode to be taken. The result can be exhilarating in one scene and baffling in the next.

Saldaña holds the film together

Zoe Saldaña gives the film its steadiest performance, and her Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress was one of the less disputed parts of its awards run. Rita is the audience’s surrogate, a clever woman pulled into something she cannot control, and Saldaña plays her with fierce physical energy in the musical sequences and real nuance between them.

Karla Sofía Gascón has the harder task of playing two versions of one character, and she brings dignity to Emilia even when the script reduces her to a symbol. Gascón, Saldaña, Gomez and Paz shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes, though Gomez is the least convincing of the four, visibly less at ease with the Spanish dialogue.

Why it divides audiences

The central problem is tone. Emilia Pérez treats transition as a device for redemption, almost a magic trick, rather than a lived experience, and it stages Mexican grief, particularly the suffering of families of the disappeared, with the breezy distance of a filmmaker working far from the realities he depicts. Largely made outside Mexico with few Mexican voices in its main creative roles, it often feels like a fantasy of a country rather than a portrait of one.

Its awards success, including a Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy and the Academy Award for Best Original Song, sits uneasily beside the backlash. The film’s failures are those of overreach rather than timidity, but they are real failures all the same.

Who should watch Emilia Pérez?

It suits adventurous viewers interested in films that provoke argument, fans of genre-mixing musical experiments and followers of Audiard’s career. Anyone looking for a sensitive, well-informed trans story or an authentic portrait of Mexico should approach with caution. There is violence, discussion of kidnapping and disappearances, and strong language.

For more from the same director:

• A Prophet, Audiard’s prison crime drama, a far more controlled and fully realised film.
• Dheepan, his Palme d’Or winner about refugees and violence, which shares this film’s interest in reinvention.

The verdict

Emilia Pérez is a bold, fascinating and frequently tone-deaf film that is easier to admire for its nerve than to love. Saldaña and a handful of vivid numbers make it worth seeing for the curious, but its glib handling of its subjects keeps it from being the triumph its awards suggested.

Rating: 3/5