Emilia Pérez
The 2024/2025 awards season will likely be remembered for the meteoric rise and sudden fall of Emilia Pérez. Jacques Audiard’s genre-defying musical crime drama premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival to widespread acclaim, quickly becoming a festival darling. It finished in the top three of the Toronto International Film Festival’s audience vote, was acquired by Netflix (which poured significant resources into its awards campaign), and went on to collect major accolades, including the Golden Globe for Best Musical or Comedy and an impressive 13 Academy Award nominations. For months, it seemed unstoppable—until it became more widely available to general audiences.
The backlash began with an early musical number featuring campy jokes about gender-affirming surgery, which, when taken out of context, became a laughingstock on social media. The criticism intensified when both Mexican audiences and members of the trans community—two groups the film directly represents—began calling out issues of misrepresentation. Audiard himself didn’t help matters when he admitted in interviews that he hadn’t deeply researched Mexican culture. Soon, every facet of the film was under scrutiny, from its musical numbers to its performances. Some of these critiques were valid; others felt exaggerated. Selena Gomez, for example, was harshly criticized for her Spanish pronunciation, though her character is explicitly written as an American, making her imperfect Spanish entirely justified within the narrative. The final blow came when old tweets from lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón resurfaced, revealing racist remarks that led Netflix to sever ties with her, even refusing to fly her to award ceremonies.
For all the controversy, Emilia Pérez remains a good film. Yes, it’s a story about a deeply flawed character, told by a French director who isn’t aiming for strict realism. But it’s not meant to be a definitive trans narrative—it’s a fable, a heightened musical about reinvention, freedom, and whether people can truly escape their past. While some criticisms—particularly about its bloated second half—are valid, the idea that every film tackling real-world issues must adhere to strict authenticity standards is a slippery slope. If we applied that same logic across cinema, Conclave wouldn’t be valid because it wasn’t filmed inside the Vatican by actual cardinals.
If you can look past the discourse, you’ll find an undeniably engaging film with plenty to chew on. From an entertainment perspective, Emilia Pérez is masterfully edited, keeping the momentum high even as it juggles multiple thematic threads. The first hour, in particular, is impressively economical, conveying a wealth of information with minimal exposition. Even when the film starts to lose focus in the latter half, it remains consistently compelling. The story moves at such a rapid pace that major developments can feel abrupt. Much like Rita latches onto Emilia’s transformation as a way to give her own life meaning, Emilia herself soon finds a new purpose in helping kidnapped children, throwing herself into yet another reinvention. These shifts may feel sudden, but isn’t that what we do in real life? Searching for fulfillment often means grasping onto the next thing, believing it will provide the missing piece. Rita offers justifications—such as supporting Emilia’s transition as a way to change society—but they feel more like self-explanations rather than deep-seated convictions, another layer to the film’s exploration of how we justify our actions to ourselves.
At its heart, Emilia Pérez is about women seeking fulfillment in different ways. Each of the four central characters is desperate to fill an internal void—whether through money, activism, sex, or reinvention. Rita clings to Emilia’s journey because it mirrors her own existential search. She’s a 40-year-old lawyer with no lover, no children, and nothing she truly feels proud of, despite her professional success. Emilia, too, believes she’ll feel whole once she transitions, but after helping grieving Mexican families find their missing children, she begins to crave something more, unable to reconcile the life she abandoned. These themes—about whether true reinvention is possible or if the past always lingers—are the film’s most thought-provoking elements.
Where the film stumbles is in its attempt to tackle too much. By the time Emilia’s actions are celebrated in the third act, it’s unclear where the film stands on some of its own moral questions. Does Emilia Pérez suggest that good deeds outweigh past sins? What about the corrupt politicians funding the cause? Does Jessie (Gomez) truly forgive Emilia in the end? The film raises these questions but rushes through its final moments without providing much resolution, making its grand finale feel somewhat abrupt. Those scenes could have truly benefited from a standout musical number to tie it all together—something the film noticeably lacks, especially in its climax. Without a defining climactic number, the film’s emotional resolution feels less impactful than it should, missing an opportunity to bring together its most compelling themes in a truly cathartic way.
The film’s climax isn’t the only place where its musical elements feel underwhelming. Much has been said about the film’s soundtrack, with some dismissing the songs as weak. While great musicals often feature songs that stand on their own as compelling compositions, that isn’t a requirement. The purpose of a musical number is to serve the story and characters, allowing them to express emotions that dialogue alone cannot. In this regard, the songs do their job, reinforcing the film’s stylized, heightened reality. More importantly, the musical sequences themselves are visually inventive and cleverly staged. The standout El Mal number, for instance, sees Saldaña delivering a ferocious performance as the camera strategically moves and the surrounding action freezes. Another particularly creative moment has Jessie stepping in and out of a room mid-song.
The performances elevate a lot of the material. Zoe Saldaña is the MVP, giving a fierce and captivating performance that grounds the film’s heightened energy. She excels in both dance and song, fully inhabiting Rita’s arc as a woman who helps others reinvent themselves while grappling with her own uncertainty about what fulfillment looks like. She manages to make Rita feel fully fleshed out despite often playing a supporting role in others’ stories. Karla Sofía Gascón brings nuance to the title role, portraying Emilia’s longing and contradictions with sincerity, and while some of the script’s beats don’t always give her room to delve into deeper emotions, she makes the character’s conflicts compelling.
Selena Gomez, often underrated as an actress, brings a quiet but affecting depth to Jessie, her measured performance capturing the weight of unspoken pain. She balances her character’s resentment, grief, and lingering attachment with impressive restraint, particularly in the film’s most heightened, melodramatic moments. Her performance gives Jessie’s heartbreak an emotional credibility that makes her role far more than a side note to Emilia’s arc.
For all its imperfections, Emilia Pérez is undeniably ambitious and rarely dull. It swings big, and while it doesn’t always land, it’s never uninteresting. Its divisive reception may overshadow its strengths, but for those willing to engage with its bold choices and thematic depth, there’s a lot to appreciate.