Zoe Saldana’s Spectacular Netflix Crime Musical Melodrama Defies All Genres

Emilia Pérez is a film that defies classification. It is, all at once, a narco crime saga, a melodrama, and a pop opera tackling themes of identity, redemption, and evolution. It’s wrapped in over-the-top musical theatrics, too, with the movie beginning with Zoe Saldaña’s under-appreciated lawyer Rita performing a song about a murder case in the neon-lit streets of Mexico. From there, it gets even bolder.

Emilia Pérez is unlike anything you’ve ever seen, both for the audacious story at its center and for Jacques Audiard’s direction, which blends high theatrics and experimental technique. It’s a miracle that a movie like this even exists. Anchored by three deeply moving performances, Emilia Pérez works despite the fact that it shouldn’t, making for an affecting and thrilling drama that teeters between chaos and control.

Emilia Pérez Is An Electrifying Experience

I’ve never seen anything like it

From the first musical number, Emilia Pérez reveals itself as something wholly original. The film finds power in these moments, as when Rita sings about her unsatisfying job or when Karla Sofía Gascón sings with melancholy about her character’s gender-affirming surgery as Juan “Manitas” Del Monte.

In short, Emilia Pérez is about Manitas, a powerful drug lord who wishes to transition into a woman and live her life as it’s meant to be lived. Enlisting the help of Rita, Manitas eventually achieves this goal, leaving behind her wife Jessi (Selena Gomez, as you’ve never seen her before) and two children out of fear for their safety.

Some years have passed since her transition when Emilia returns to reclaim her old life, including her former wife and children, who she tucked away in Switzerland before her transition. She reconnects with Rita and begins work to repent for her sins in her former life. There are tens of thousands of missing people in Mexico and Emilia hopes to give their families closure.

It’s a redemption story, sure, but the film also asks if Emilia can be truly absolved for what she’s done and whether she’s really changed. The answer is complicated. But Emilia Pérez is a complicated film, one that perhaps tackles too much thematically. A lot of threads are left unexplored in favor of spectacle, but that spectacle is a feature, not a bug, and those unexplored threads don’t negate the power of the film.

Once Emilia returns to Mexico, the movie opts for a moral tale about the past and whether it’s possible to atone for horrific crimes. To reveal the film’s answer would be a spoiler, but the sins of the past rear their ugly heads in various ways, though Emilia Pérez is more concerned with her life than it is the thorny questions it poses.

Karla Sofía Gascón Gives A Stunning Performance As The Title Character

Supported by Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldaña, and Adriana Paz

The entire cast of Emilia Pérez, including supporting players Edgar Ramirez (always a delight) and Adriana Paz (delicate yet formidable as Epifanía) hold up the movie, but it’s Gascón that lights up the screen. Tasked with juggling all the weighty themes of the film, the actress gives a complex and layered performance as the title character.

Each relationship — particularly between the core four women — is explored with nuance. Gascón is slyly mischievous with Jessi, tender and loving with Epifanía, and resolute yet trusting with Rita. Though there are multiple love stories in Emilia Pérez, the most fascinating is the one between Rita and Emilia.

It’s a testament to Saldaña and Gascón’s power that a quiet conversation in the middle of a restaurant — part of it sung, lights dramatically dimmed so that only the pair are spotlighted as others talk around them — is as compelling and heart-racing as it is. There are many of these stylistic flourishes in Emilia Pérez, making the film feel vibrant and kinetic. It’s not a perfect film, but Emilia Pérez is endlessly captivating, an exercise in genre, tone, and sheer fearlessness.

It was acquired by Netflix after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, but if you can see it in a theater, you absolutely must. Again, it’s rare that a film like Emilia Pérez comes along, and it deserves to be seen on the biggest screen possible so that you can feel the energy that exudes from the screen, see the song-and-dance numbers in all their glory, and experience a once-in-a-lifetime film the way it was meant to be experienced.

Emilia Pérez premiered at the Cannes Film Festival before screening at the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. The film is 132 minutes long and rated R for language, some violent content and sexual material.