Emilia Pérez (2024) Review Ahead of The Oscars/97th Academy Awards

(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)

The 97th Academy Awards are rapidly approaching, and the nominations are packed with impressive films. Actors and actresses have delivered performances worthy of a nomination.

I decided to focus on the Best Picture nominations, one of the more important categories. I wanted to select a film that I’ve never seen before as a way to expand my film taste (sorry, Wicked). The film that I picked to watch and write a movie review on is Emilia Pérez (2024).

Emilia Pérez is a Spanish musical/thriller starring Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, and Édgar Ramírez. In this film, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is an attorney who gets an anonymous call for a meet-up. After getting kidnapped, she meets a cartel kingpin named Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón). Rita is assigned a mission to help Manitas transition as a woman.

After searching for doctors who could perform the transition surgery, Rita finds a doctor, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir), who completes this surgery. After the surgery, Manita’s wife, Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their kids are relocated to Switzerland for safety reasons. Manitas faked their death and goes by a new name, Emilia Pérez, and Rita ends up getting paid a large sum of money for completing this mission.

Four years later, Rita comes across Emilia in London, and Emilia wants to reunite with her children. Rita and Emilia were able to get Jessi and the kids to move back to Mexico City, with Emilia posing as a distant, wealthy cousin of Manitas, and they live with her in her luxurious mansion.

After Rita and Emilia come across a mother who is looking for her missing son, Emilia uses her connections with incarcerated cartel members to create a nonprofit foundation that helps identify the bodies of missing cartel victims. While working at the foundation, Emilia meets Epifanía Flores (Adriana Paz) to confirm the death of her abusive husband. From there, they began a relationship.

Meanwhile, Jessi rekindles a relationship with a man named Gustavo Brun (Édgar Ramírez), a man she met and had a prior relationship and affair with during the later years of their marriage. After revealing to Emilia that she is going to marry Gustavo and move into a new house with the kids, Emilia and Jessi get into an intense argument, which results in Jessi fleeing and moving out, taking the kids with her.

Emilia ends up cutting off Jessi’s allowance and threatens Gustavo to leave Mexico City, which leads Jessi and Gustavo to kidnap Emilia and demand a ransom from Rita. They even sent Rita a package that contained Emilia’s severed fingers. When Rita arrives at the location where Jessi and Gustavo are holding Emilia hostage, she attempts to negotiate with the two. However, a shootout happens between Jessi and Gustavo and the security team Rita brought with her.

Emilia ends up telling Jessi the truth about her and shares intimate details about the early days of their relationship, including their wedding day. Confused, Jessi and Gustavo loaded Emilia into the trunk of Gustavo’s car, and the two of them drove off. After putting two and two together, Jessi feels guilty and begs Gustavo to pull over, with Jessi holding him at gunpoint. While fighting for the gun, the car flew off a cliff and flipped over multiple times before it blew up, killing Jessi, Gustavo, and Emilia.

Rita sees the car explosion. Feeling distraught, Rita tells Jessi’s children that she’ll be their guardian. Epifanía leads a crowd in a march, honoring Emilia by singing her eulogy and celebrating Emilia’s fight for truth and freedom.

The overall theme of Emilia Pérez is to show audiences Emilia wanting to live her true, authentic self as a woman. The risk she took was leaving her past as a cartel kingpin behind and faking her death, despite it hurting her wife and children. As a result of her past involvement in the cartel, Emilia created the nonprofit organization to find missing cartel victims, her way of making a good contribution back into society.

Rita played a great yet essential role in the film by helping Emilia in multiple ways, such as assisting her in her transition, reuniting Emilia with her children, creating the nonprofit organization, and trying to rescue Emilia from Jessi and Gustavo. Zoe Saldaña delivers a great performance as Rita, which made me understand why she was able to snag a couple of awards for her role as a supporting actress in the film.

Meanwhile, Selena Gomez’s performance as Jessi was decent, with her singing being okay (it could’ve been better). I did enjoy the visual representation of the film, such as the bright, vibrant colors and aesthetics, which portrayed the events and emotions that I witnessed while watching this film.

A few gripes and critiques that I have about this film are the musical aspect of it. I feel as though the film would’ve been a lot stronger in quality without the musical angle and characters breaking into song. Based on what I said about Selena Gomez’s singing in this film, it is safe to say that it was very lackluster.

Another gripe I have is the time jump in the film. I thought it was way too early and too fast for a film with a runtime of 2 hours and 10 minutes. A couple of parts in the film that I believe should’ve been more detailed and longer are the process of Rita arranging the transition surgery for Emilia and Emilia’s struggles of gender dysphoria growing up and throughout her adulthood before enlisting Rita for the mission. The film should’ve included how isolated and lonely Jessi felt, especially after learning about the “death” of Manitas in the news, as well as the emotions the kids experienced.

Once again, it makes sense and is very understandable that Zoe Saldana won an award as Best Supporting Actress. I believe that she carried the film and was the most entertaining part of it, in my opinion. As for the other nominations for this film, I am on the fence about whether or not the nominations are well-deserved. Of course, the only way we will find out which Oscar awards Emilia Pérez may win is by watching the actual award ceremony.

Rating: 2.5/5