Why is Emilia Pérez so polarising?

This Oscars season the film on everybody’s lips is Netflix’s musical crime drama Emilia Pérez – for both good and bad reasons. After a history-making awards flush that has included the Jury Prize and Best Actress Prize (shared between all four leading actresses) at Cannes, four Golden Globes, and the most Academy Award nominations of any non-English-language film in history (13), Emilia Pérez is facing a backlash on multiple fronts.

The story of a Mexican cartel leader who fakes her death, transitions gender, and attempts to atone for her violent past, it has drawn heavy criticism from both Mexican and trans critics, who have argued that the film relies on regressive stereotypes and badly rendered Spanish. Meanwhile, the actress who plays Pérez, Karla Sofía Gascón – the first openly trans person ever nominated for an acting Oscar – is facing her own storm of controversy, after journalist Sarah Hagi uncovered her long history of racist and Islamophobic social media posts. But despite its vexed Oscars campaign, the movie is wildly popular with many critics and awards voters, who have lauded it as one of the most audacious and inventive films of 2024.

Many films have been loved by awards panels and disliked by regular cinemagoers, but the split for Emilia Pérez is unusually stark: even taking things like review-bombing into account, the film’s scores on Letterboxd (2.2/5) and Rotten Tomatoes’ Popcornometer (18 per cent) are shockingly low for such a feted film. So, what is the movie actually like? What’s driving this split in reception? And what can that tell us about film culture in 2025?

There are several things you can gather from Emilia Pérez by reading either a positive review or a negative one: it’s a formally strange and flashy film, and one that continually moves between emotional realism and more dreamlike, artificial sequences. It’s also a musical, but one where most of the songs aren’t ‘songs’ in the typical sense – they often lack repetition or typical song structure, though they are sometimes accompanied by dramatic dance numbers. Many reviews talk about how enticing and crazy and new this form feels to watch; Jack Hamilton, in Slate, references “the film’s hyperactive pursuit of the gee-whiz blurb – you’ve never seen anything like this”. Going into the film, I wanted to be dazzled by that novelty, to understand its appeal. But I came away feeling like being seduced by Emilia Pérez would require a level of trust in the film that it didn’t earn.

From the start, the film is full of both stereotypes and bizarre representational choices. It opens with a lingering, close-up shot of a mariachi band (we’re in Mexico!); a Mexican character smells of “spicy food, spicy spicy […] mezcal and guacamole”; at the film’s climax Emilia is kidnapped and her fingers cut off, even though this is a nonsensical decision for her kidnappers to make, but… Mexico. Cartels. As for the trans representation, we get some regular hacky tropes about transition (Emilia only ‘becomes’ a woman in the eyes of the film when she gets a vaginoplasty, for instance), combined with a lot of more comically off-the-wall choices: a much-memed musical number is set in a sex change clinic, and pre-transition Emilia is played by Gascón in a terrible fake beard and grills. These choices are very funny, but the film frames most of them with thorough seriousness.

Emilia Pérez is a strange example of a film that is often too committed to prim, worthy realism to be truly weird or wild, but that also lacks interest in the interiority or motivations of its characters, making true realism impossible. It’s also not a magnificent or stylish enough movie to distract us from these problems. The visuals and cinematography are competent, but rarely beautiful; the sound mixing on some songs is a serious problem; and the songs themselves, lyrically and melodically, are quite weak. A common sentiment from viewers is that they couldn’t remember any of the songs after leaving the theatre.

The film is full of both stereotypes and bizarre representational choices

There are glimmers of a better movie when watching Emilia Pérez, often in scenes between its four lead actresses. A scene in which Emilia talks to her ex-wife Jessi (who doesn’t know who she is) about their past relationship opens up so many fascinating questions, as does Emilia’s tender new relationship post-transition with Epifania, the widow of an abusive man who Emilia might have killed. (Emilia is a lesbian now, and has been made newly socially vulnerable! Are the implications of this explored? You bet they aren’t!) But the film is only interested in giving us just enough information about each character to fill a Top Trumps card – Emilia wants atonement, Rita wants kids, Jessi wants to get back with her ex-boyfriend who we are given no reason to care about – and then speedily throwing us into the next scene. We’re given little reason to care about their actions (even interestingly self-sabotaging and immoral actions), or the plot, and we rarely revisit or linger on any of the film’s questions. I was struck at the end of the film by the knowledge that I’d been watching for 132 minutes, and yet I felt like I’d experienced much fewer than 132 minutes’ worth of actual content.

So, why do awards voters love and respect this film so much? What do they see that I don’t? The most widely offered answer to that question from the film’s detractors is that Emilia Perez’s awards show popularity comes from the same lineage as Crash, Green Book and The Help: white, liberal, often older voters enjoy the progressive credentials of liking and supporting a film about a Mexican trans woman, while actually endorsing the flattening and reframing of ‘exotic’ material for a white, non-Hispanic audience. And that’s probably true for some, but it’s an incomplete answer. When Roger Ebert gave Crash a four-star review in 2005, he said he believed in the film’s capacity to potentially make its audience “better people […] to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves”. That’s not the tone that filmmakers and critics are taking with Emilia Perez. Very few positive reviews or voters’ comments are lauding the film’s ability to change minds and win hearts. (What would it be changing minds and winning hearts about, anyway? ‘It’s sad when cartels murder Mexican civilians’? Is that controversial?) Instead, Academy voters have said that Emilia Perez is “cinema” (Guillermo del Toro), “fearless filmmaking” (Drew Goddard), “a completely singular experience” (Emily Blunt). Something in this film is absorbing people.

My working theory, from reading a lot of reviews, is that the film’s strange musical style is probably key to its awards popularity. The fact that the music isn’t catchy, that it mostly takes the form of meandering monologues from actors who can’t really sing, makes viewers feel like they’re watching something more edifying and strange than a ‘musical’. The film was originally planned to be an opera, and the result is kind of like an opera for people who have never seen an opera and don’t plan to. Add in that non-Spanish-speakers will be focused on the subtitles and dancing and often won’t really think much about the quality of the sound, or will trust in the boundless depth of the original lyrics, and you have a recipe for a viewer who thinks they are understanding 50 per cent of a cinematic masterpiece.

‘Audacious’ films rely a lot on their audience trusting them, and Emilia Pérez has a lot of trust-building apparatuses surrounding it: its Netflix backing, its Hollywood heavyweight cast members (Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez), the unfamiliarity and seriousness of its subject matter for many viewers, its ambitious formal gambits. Chief among these trust-building mystifications is its double foreignness: it is a French production (a country associated with high art), written in Spanish and set in Mexico (so those of us who don’t speak Spanish can’t intuit if anything’s ‘off’ with the script), but which subtly deploys English-language scenes and English-speaking actors in a way that makes an English-language audience feel like it’s still for them. The selective appetite for non-English-language films has increased in recent years within the Academy, and Emilia Pérez strikes a precise balance of feeling worldly while also being culturally legible to Americans and politically ‘easy’ – it is not hard or divisive to be against murder and corruption in a foreign, stigmatised country.

The awards popularity of Emilia Pérez is partly a function of film insiders’ trust that the film’s big swings must be doing something consequential and morally meaningful, because that’s what they’ve been sold, and that’s what they’ve intuitively felt or projected onto the film’s curiously elusive statements. If I’m right about that, Emilia Pérez is unlikely to convert many of its nominations into wins, given the growing influx of criticism and the ongoing discreditation of the film’s lead actress. Social media controversy doesn’t necessarily impact Oscar voters all that much, but anything that jeopardises community trust in the film will make people rethink whether Audiard’s ‘fever dream’ offers depth, or a sickly illusion of depth. But maybe I’m wrong; maybe their belief in Emilia Pérez is more tenacious than I can know. Mezcal and guacamole, indeed.