Emilia Pérez movie review: Karla Sofia Gascón and Zoe Saldaña’s narco-musical melange is an acquired taste

Karla Sofia Gascón and Zoe Saldaña in a still from ‘Emilia Pérez’
| Photo Credit: Netflix

French director Jacques Audiard embarks on his latest jaunt that’s part telenovela, part musical, and entirely a potpourri of genre-hopping that meanders between amusing and exhausting. If a film about a ruthless Mexican drug lord turned flamboyant philanthropist through gender-affirming surgery sounds outlandish, rest assured, Audiard’s first tryst with the musical genre is unapologetically, sometimes breathtakingly, so. Yet, this relentless pursuit of showboat-y spectacle leaves the story adrift, tangled in a diluted haze of opportunities.

At the film’s heart is the metamorphosis of Manitas Del Monte, a fearsome cartel boss who emerges from surgery as Emilia — a woman ready to rewrite her legacy. Karla Sofía Gascón is riveting in the role, yet her character’s journey is obscured by Audiard’s surface-level dazzle. While the musical might skimp on nuance, there’s an undeniable thrill in its audacity. Emilia’s transformation isn’t just physical; it’s a rebirth draped in grand gestures and darkened by layers of guilt. Gascón imbues Emilia with a mournful dignity, shading her journey with notes of tragedy and liberation that the cavalier script only faintly suggests. Even if Audiard’s screenplay doesn’t quite manage to plumb the depths of Emilia, Gascón’s performance carves out surprising pockets of vulnerability amid the chaos.

Emilia finds an unlikely ally in Rita, a paralegal portrayed by a tremendous Zoe Saldaña. Rita is riddled with frustration, both enthralled and repulsed by the riches she’s accumulated from her morally tainted work. Saldaña brings a grounded intensity to Rita that affords some welcome complexity amidst the story’s theatrics.

The movie unfolds in melodramatic layers, punctuated by musical interludes that serve as high-energy, technicolour escapades—sometimes haunting, often absurd. In one sequence, Rita leads a spirited chorus of street cleaners in a courthouse dance, and later, she shares the stage with Emilia in no-holds-barred number that satirizes the hypocrisy of Mexico’s elite.

As garish as they are riveting, these moments are shot in a blend of pastel hues and glitzy neon by cinematographer Paul Guilhaume. But the showiness of these scenes often belies their lack of substance; each number is a lavish distraction rather than an insight into Emilia’s psychological transformation.

Emilia is portrayed as a figure in flux, at once powerful and profoundly wounded, haunted by the crimes of her past yet eager for redemption. Her arc of atonement, however, is underdeveloped, sketched with broad strokes and populated with clichés. The character’s metamorphosis from hardened criminal to virtuous philanthropist is conveyed less through meaningful self-reflection than through her new wardrobe and carefully cultivated rebranding as a social saviour. It’s a convenient redemption arc that demands little reckoning from Emilia herself.

And herein lies the rub. Audiard’s approach to character development in Emilia Pérez feels, at times, cynical. Rather than mining the narrative richness in the contradictions of a cartel boss’s moral awakening — or the messy, raw complexities of gender transition — the film flits from one plot point to another, shoehorning characters into a tight mould. There’s barely room for the layered subtext that could have emerged if Audiard had lingered on Emilia’s inner conflict.

There are flickers of brilliance that hint at the film that Emilia Pérez could have been. These rare, quieter moments, where the film pauses to let Gascón and Saldaña shine, offer glimpses into the potential lurking beneath the gloss.

With Emilia Pérez, Audiard has crafted a hybrid beast of a film that feels almost experimental in its ambition. It’s not a work that endeavors to distill truths about Mexico, nor does it attempt to pontificate on trans identity. Rather, it’s a story about transformation, about redemption’s unpredictable path, and about humanity’s universal longing to be understood. Audiard’s takeaway, as best we can glean, is that reinvention is an act of bravery — though, for Emilia, one that doesn’t wash away her past.

Emilia Pérez ultimately offers a wild, sometimes exasperating experience — a film that wants to be all things at once: a meditation on identity, a satire of justice, a surrealist musical, and a crime thriller. The heady blend proves too unruly for even Gascón’s remarkable performance to fully anchor. Yet, there’s something oddly admirable about its refusal to be tamed.

Emilia Pérez is currently streaming on Netflix