A sex change instantly transforms a murderous cartel kingpin into a savior who searches for the missing bodies of Mexico’s drug war. “How many have disappeared?” she innocently asks her assistant, as if she wasn’t the one who put them in the ground. This is Emilia Pérez.
I put off watching this film because of the vitriol surrounding it. It didn’t feel right to jump on a hate train for media about Transgender and Mexican people when both are at the center of the culture war and need support. But media has the power to shift the tide, and as a Mexican Queer, I needed to see what this so-called “representation” actually represented. I knew we were in trouble when the gender reassignment surgery was treated with the nuance of a musical shopping montage and the Joker’s transformation in Batman.
This film is a painfully outdated musical about Queerness that might have been groundbreaking in the ’90s, fitting alongside Romeo + Juliet and In & Out. It believes both that gender transition can instantly change the soul and that it can (and should) also be a tool for deception. Half of the plot revolves around Mrs. Doubtfire-level trickery, which might have been compelling if deception weren’t the very excuse used to justify the criminalization and murder of Trans people in the real world right now. I can’t believe people are still telling Queer stories like this in 2025 and being rewarded for it.
The most baffling part of Emilia Pérez has been its awards sweep, but this is by design. This isn’t a scrappy indie with a big, timely idea and some missteps. It’s a $26 million Netflix production starring a billionaire pop star (Gomez) and one of the highest-grossing actresses of all time (Saldaña), with an esteemed French director, costumes by Yves Saint Laurent, and a media blitzkrieg that led to it becoming the most Oscar-nominated film of the year. The plan worked, sweeping awards despite universal spite. But at what cost?
It flattens complex issues to make them digestible for audiences untouched by them. It’s a story about Transness for people with no proximity to Trans culture, about Mexico by and for non-Mexicans unaffected by cartel violence, in Spanish for people who don’t speak Spanish, and a musical for people who don’t watch musicals. Classic Oscar bait engineered to assuage white, cis guilt. The racial and cultural issues are legion. Mexico is depicted as corrupt, helpless and beyond repair. The film is so detached from Mexican culture and its notorious colorism that, by casting a white Spanish actress, it doesn’t even know it’s a white savior cliché.
The cast should have known better. Many are giving Zoë Saldaña a pass. She does give this film her all, but her pass expired in 2016 when she slathered darker foundation on her face to play Nina Simone. Who is reading her scripts? Selena Gomez speaking Spanish phonetically sounds like nails on a chalkboard to Spanish speakers like myself. Every time she talks, it feels like a project made by a French team using Google Translate.
And Karla Sofía Gascón, at the biggest moment of her career, with the weight of “representation” on her shoulders, didn’t think to delete the racist tweets that have imperiled her future—probably because she didn’t find them offensive. That choice reflects poorly on her character and her decision to be in a film that so many in her community are speaking out against. All of these careless or clueless choices embody the ethos of the entire project. These people didn’t see the issues or didn’t care, and I don’t know which is worse.
There are no excuses for this film. It reinforces the worst stereotypes at the worst possible time: about what a gender transition is and about the complexities of Mexico’s drug trade. It’s so reductive that it feels like it was originally designed to fail, as if someone wanted to ensure we never get films about Mexico and Trans people again, only to end up with a hit. It would be campy if it weren’t so dull, predictable and proud of itself. The ending, with yet another Queer martyr and Mexican peasants marching the streets, had me laughing out loud.
Emilia Pérez is grotesque in its simplicity. It’s not a film about missing people; it’s a lesson in missed opportunities.
More how Queer media affects how we view ourselves in Analog Cruising and POST.
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