Movie Review: Emilia Pérez (2024)

[Dave Gray]

Emilia Pérez (2024)

Premise: A Mexican drug kingpin enlists a junior attorney for a secret project.

Rating: Excellent, but the genre-hopping that draws many in will push as many people away.

This is a hard film to review, which is why I chose to do it here.  The plot of the film, which I am dancing around in the premise line above, keeps you guessing and had several moments where I was legitimately surprised.  I sat up in my chair multiple times at the reveal of new information, but every time, I felt that the reveals were fair and were reasonable character actions based on set-up expectations, if not explicitly foreshadowed.  In this way, the film is a very competent and compelling crime drama with incredible turns.

But wait...

It's also a musical.  And sometimes kind of a comedy.  And sort of a thriller.  And most of it is in Spanish, but with actors you know from American films.

If none of that sounds like it makes sense, you're feeling what I was feeling.  The film is genre-less in that way.  It's a gritty crime thriller, but it will add in moments of levity and emotion through songs.  But these aren't Broadway style songs.  Often, it's characters whisper-singing or delivering almost gritty renditions to reveal what characters are thinking.  It's atypical to say the least.  Despite being a musical, it's mostly not one and much of the movie is a traditional narrative.  When a song kicks in, often I was like "oh yeah...music stuff".  This isn't the kind of musical that you will want to listen to the songs on the radio.  It's not bangers.  The direction is clever in how the musical scenes are portrayed, with dirty streets where the extras become dancers, to more over the top comical numbers, to real-world, bad karaoke that morphs into full breathed pop stardom, to step-style beat-making, to gangsters whisper-rapping their inner-most thoughts, to characters literally dancing in and out of reality during song.  It's a wild ride.

There are three main performances: The lead gangster, with whom I was unfamiliar.  Zoe Saldana, who plays the attorney, and Selena Gomez, who plays the wife of the drug lord.  All are Oscar-level spectacular and will be in the conversations, if not nominated and winning.

I don't expect the crowd here to go for foreign language crime musicals, so I can't give this a blanket recommendation.  And even if I did, I would understand if the skipping around between genres was a major turn off.  For me, the fact that I didn't have to sit in a stodgy crime drama and was given these strange asides -- it all really worked for me.  You'll never have seen anything like it.  But if you sound intrigued, the actual story underneath it all is superb.