CONTAINS SPOILERS!
Imagine, if you will, a film that tries to cram a courtroom procedural, a cartel drama, a trans woman’s odyssey, and a tortured family melodrama into its 138-minute runtime. Now imagine that it somehow works—not seamlessly, but with such brazen energy that you find yourself swept along, protesting at first but finally giving in, like a child on a roller coaster. That’s Emilia Pérez: garish, overstuffed, but unshakably compelling. The director (I suspect) didn’t just want to make a film but an event, the kind of movie that doesn’t leave you when you leave the theater. It’s not perfect, but perfection would have made it smaller.
We open on Rita Mora Castro, a criminal defense attorney whose reputation has been built not on brilliance (though she has that, too) but on a willingness to throw her principles into the nearest dumpster. Played by Zoe Saldana, Rita is a coiled spring of nerves, ambition, and latent self-loathing—a woman who can sell any story in court but hasn’t yet figured out what story she wants to tell herself. The camera loves her in the way that only a cruel director can, lingering on the fine lines around her mouth, the slight tremor in her hands, her moments of exhaustion when she thinks no one is watching. She’s the anti-heroine we’ve been trained to root for, but this film doesn’t let you off the hook.
Her downfall—or her salvation, depending on how you read it—begins with El Alegato, a trial as messy as the press surrounding it. Rita takes on the defense of a high-profile murder case involving the wife of a famous media mogul, going against her conscience to argue the death as a suicide, while keeping one eye on her own career trajectory. The film doesn’t linger long in the courtroom, though; it’s just a prologue to the moral swamp that follows. Rita wins the case but not the peace of mind she thought would come with it. Victory tastes like ash.
Cue the mysterious phone call. The kind that only happens in movies—an offer Rita can’t refuse but desperately wants to. The client is Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, a cartel kingpin whose very name sends shivers through Mexico’s underworld. But here’s the twist: Manitas doesn’t want a legal defense. She wants to leave her world behind, not as the feared criminal she’s been but as the woman she’s always known herself to be. She needs Rita to help her transition—and to disappear. What follows is less a plot twist than a narrative leap into the absurd, the sublime, and the impossibly sincere.
The film’s most fascinating stretch begins with Rita’s reluctant agreement. This isn’t Priscilla, Queen of the Desert or even The Danish Girl. There’s no montage of shopping sprees or teary-eyed self-discovery. Instead, we follow Manitas (played by Karla Sofía Gascón) and Rita across Bangkok, Tel Aviv, and a handful of less glamorous locales as they navigate the labyrinth of medical bureaucracy. The director, Jacques Audiard, balances these sequences between deadpan comedy and raw pathos. There’s a scene where Manitas, now Emilia, practices walking in heels for the first time, and it’s played not for laughs or tears but a kind of quiet dignity. It’s moments like this that remind you the film isn’t asking for your approval—it’s asking for your attention.
Emilia’s transition is only the beginning of her transformation, though. Once she’s staged her own death and secured her family’s safety in Switzerland, the film leaps ahead four years. Here, it becomes something else entirely, a story about identity and the impossibility of erasing your past. When Emilia and Rita cross paths again in London, the mood is both charged and subdued, as if neither knows what to say but both know what the other is thinking. Emilia’s longing to reconnect with her children feels almost unbearable in its urgency, but the film is smart enough to keep her motivations opaque. Is this guilt? Redemption? Or just an inability to let go?
The final act spirals into melodrama—guns, betrayals, kidnappings—but it’s melodrama of a high order. The kind that doesn’t just pull at your heartstrings but yanks them violently, daring you to call it manipulative. Emilia’s confrontation with her wife, Jessi, is the film’s emotional peak, a collision of love and resentment that refuses to resolve neatly. Jessi, who’s built a new life with another man, doesn’t recognize Emilia at first. When the truth comes out, it’s a gut punch—not because it’s surprising but because it feels inevitable. The scene where their son, still a child, confesses that he recognizes Emilia’s scent is almost too much. It walks the line between poignancy and sentimentality, and whether it succeeds depends entirely on your tolerance for such risks.
The film’s visual style is as chaotic as its narrative, swinging between lush, painterly compositions and grainy, handheld immediacy. At times, it feels like two different cinematographers were fighting over the camera, but somehow that works. The glossy aesthetic mirrors the film’s larger-than-life ambitions, while the grittier moments ground it just enough to keep it from floating away entirely.
What’s remarkable about Emilia Pérez isn’t just its audacity but its refusal to resolve itself into a tidy moral or emotional arc. Emilia’s death in the final moments—a car crash that takes her, Jessi, and Jessi’s new lover—isn’t framed as a grand tragedy or a convenient ending. It’s messy, abrupt, and infuriating. The film leaves you not with closure but a sense of unease, as if it’s daring you to make sense of it all.
And yet, for all its flaws—and there are plenty—Emilia Pérez is a film I can’t stop thinking about. It’s a sprawling, imperfect work that throws everything at the wall, and while not all of it sticks, what does is unforgettable. This is cinema at its most operatic, its most ambitious, and, occasionally, its most ridiculous. It’s not a film for everyone, but for those willing to take the ride, it’s one hell of a journey.
