I’ll be honest, I had to re-read the logline for Emilia Pérez multiple times to make sure I fully grasped what this ambitious new Netflix movie is all about. And as much as I’m intrigued to see how this genre-defying release performs on the streaming giant, I also wish there was a way I could see the faces of everyone who decides to give it a try. Because this one is … I don’t want to be so reductive as to say weird, but it definitely qualifies as the most daring feature film of 2024.
The movie, a musical about a Mexican cartel leader who wants to fake her own death before undergoing gender-reassignment surgery, has been described as “an unbelievably audacious film that feels like if Pedro Almodóvar remade Mrs. Doubtfire.” Zoe Saldaña plays a Mexican lawyer hired to help a cartel leader (Karla Sofia Gascón) secretly transition, and the pair also launches a nonprofit to help families of loved ones who’ve gone missing amid the narco wars. The cast also includes Selena Gomez as the cartel leader’s wife — and did I mention that Emilia Pérez is a musical?
It’s almost as if Netflix heard all of our complaints about the inadequacies of its film slate in recent years and decided to come up with the most hot-button minefield of a motion picture possible. Take that, you heathens who didn’t appreciate Rebel Moon!
In a Netflix promotional interview, Saldaña talked about the difficulty in wrapping her head around the Emilia Pérez script, which doesn’t easily lend itself to a bare-bones summation. “It was described to me as this film noir that didn’t really exist in any of the conventional kind of genres, but it was a musical,” she said. “It was actually an opera, and based in a crime world, but there was going to be a sense of justice, and validation, and sanctification. And I was just like, ‘What?’ I had to read it more than once. And then, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
Ahead of its Netflix debut on Nov. 13, the movie already has a solid 82% critics’ score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 78% from audiences — as well as a 7.4/10 on IMDb. Basically, the movie represents a big swing from Netflix, and it’ll either completely baffle viewers or go down as a campy winner that somehow defies the contours of the new Trump era that’s about to get underway. I should add that four of Emilia Pérez’s female cast members recently shared the Best Actress prize at Cannes. Make of that what you will.
