Emilia Pérez (2025) – Oscar Bait

Released: 16th January
Seen: 26th January

Throughout my time writing this blog, I have made a point to champion when a film presents a minority group in its narrative – even if the film itself is not particularly great, it still deserves praise for breaking the mould and showing people as they are. This has been particularly notable when it comes to a film that presents members of the LGBTQ+ community since, as a member of the G part of that acronym, it’s nice to see those in your social group represented. Even subpar representation is still, on some level, representation and deserves to be brought up. It also feels important to bring this up in regards to films that are getting Awards nominations, particularly at the Oscars who have a bad history related to this. Enter this year’s biggest Oscar nominee Emilia Pérez which might be the most high-profile story about a trans woman in cinema this year… and sadly it’s just not a good film, to the point that it’s baffling that it’s become this awards darling.

Emilia Pérez begins with the leader of a drug cartel known as Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) who approaches lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) with a proposition. See, Juan has grown tired of living a lie and wishes to undergo gender reassignment surgery to live their life authentically as a woman. Rita obliges and makes the arrangements that allow Juan to emerge into the world as Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía Gascón), though this chance at living their truth comes with some problems. For starters, Emilia had a wife and children who had to be led to believe that Juan was dead and several years later, Emilia wants to see her children and her former wife Jessi Del Monte (Selena Gomez) as they should be a part of her life. Obviously, this will not end well for anyone, particularly the audience who are forced to witness this story being violently rammed into the format of a musical for no discernable reason beyond “Well, why not?”

Let us get this out of the way now, I am not any kind of authority on whether Emilia Pérezis good trans representation or good representation of Mexican culture. I have seen several people from both communities say it’s not good at either one (and have to admit, you can kinda feel both being badly handled throughout the film and probably because the director/writer is a cisgendered french man so he knows nothing about either culture) but that is not something I can state with any authority so maybe look to trans or Mexican critics for that perspective. Emilia Pérez does have some elements that do undeniably deserve praise, little things like the trans character being portrayed by a trans woman actually matter quite a lot (she even plays the trans character pre-transition, kind of demolishing the classic “We need a cis guy to show the pre-transition era” excuse). Indeed the performance by Karla is one of the best things about Emilia Pérez, her acting is truly great and I’m hopeful that she’s going to be in a lot more major projects – better than this – so she can show what she’s capable of.

It also helps that the transition in question is not done as part of some elaborate disguise, this isn’t “Drug cartel boss needs to transition to hide from the cops” or something like that, this is someone who transitions because they’re a woman and need to be honest to themselves. It is an undeniably positive way to handle this kind of story… a positive that’s then undermined by the hyper-focus on the surgical elements of transition that crosses the line into transmedicalism (the “La Vaginoplastia” song that’s gone viral is one of the most awkward things seen in a long time) or the way they have to ensure the trans woman is somehow a villain and victim all at once. Obviously, they need to have some kind of conflict and with the story being around a former cartel kingpin it is only natural that they play some major part in that. Still, it certainly plays differently when you have a trans woman being brutalised or being pointlessly aggressive in a film made in this current climate.

However, for one minute let’s put aside the issue of how Emilia Pérez handles its representation and even ignore the issues of Spanish pronunciation that have come up in the discourse around this and just focus on this film as a musical… it sucks at being a musical, just straight up sucks. There has been no shortage of bad musicals in the last few years, things like Dear Evan Hansen or The Prom or Cats felt like they were attacks on the musical movie artform but at least I got why all of them were musicals. I get why those characters burst into song, at least you could get a good vocal performance out of each of those films and they all had the unrealised potential to be good… Emilia Perez is a bad musical that feels like it resents the fact that it’s a musical. It actively hates the fact that it has to break out into song and the songs are throwaway pieces of garbage that don’t impact the plot or tell us anything real about the characters.

None of the songs are engaging, well performed or even that memorable (this goes beyond a language barrier, you should at least be able to hum one of the tunes afterwards). The only exception to this is the La Vaginoplastia song, which only manages to be memorable because it is so awful it’s hard to forget. No one in Emilia Pérez is a good singer, at least they aren’t bringing it here because there are times when they strain to hit the notes they’ve been asked to hit and the patter of the songs are all awful. There’s nothing there to grab onto and you learn nothing about anyone in the songs that couldn’t just be done with dialogue. There’s an old rule of musicals that when the emotions are too high for speaking, you sing… the emotions never get high enough to warrant anyone breaking out into song, but they do it anyway because otherwise, Emilia Pérez becomes pointless.

While the plot of Emilia Pérez might be simplistic, it’s stretched out to its limit and paced badly. The idea should be easy, a former cartel leader becoming their true selves and trying to make right for their past. It feels like it should be something simple and compelling but it’s not, every potential ball is dropped and it feels like you have to do all the work to keep up. I want to care about these characters, I want to have a reason to root for Rita but frankly, she’s just kind of there. I want to enjoy Emilia reclaiming her life and fixing her past but there are so many times where she just grandstands that it’s impossible. I even want to like Jessi and hope for her to move on from her past but she’s a nothing character so why should I care? Emilia Pérez offers nothing to latch onto, it’s a musical by obligation and a drama by pure happenstance, except they can’t make it an intriguing drama or even so over the top that it’d be a melodrama so they seemingly decided to go with blandness instead. 

Emilia Pérez was doomed from the start – it’s not well written as a movie and certainly not as a musical. While it might have performances that are perfectly fine and occasionally looks above average in several moments, that’s nowhere near enough to bring it to the realm of good and certainly doesn’t begin to explain how the hell this film has become the awards darling of the year. It’s not the worst thing that has ever been nominated for awards and probably won’t be the worst film seen this year, but for the life of me, I cannot see a single reason why it’s getting the praise it’s been getting just based on what’s actually being presented in the film. Emilia Pérez tried to do something progressive and good for representation, it’s just a pity that it failed.