(WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD)
With the 2025 Oscars rapidly approaching, I accepted the suggestion from my friend Meghan (shoutout to her) to write a movie review on a Oscar-nominated film. This year’s Oscars nominations are jam-packed with impressive films that have came out within the last year and actors and actresses who have delivered performances worthy of a nomination.
I decided to focus on the Best Picture nominations, thinking that it is one of 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 musicial/thriller that stars Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, and Édgar Ramírez. In this film, Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) is a attorney who gets a anonymous call for a meet up. After getting kidnapped, she meets a cartel kingpin named Juan “Manitas” Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) and assigned Rita with a mission to help Manitas to transition as a woman.
After searching for doctors who could perform the transition surgery, Rita finds a doctor, Dr. Wasserman (Mark Ivanir) who is able to complete 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 comes across a mother who is looking for her missing son, Emilia uses her connections of 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 as lovers.
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 Jessi to flee and move out, taking the kids with her.
Emilia ends up cutting off Jessi’s allowance and threatens Gustavo to leave Mexico City, which leads to 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, but a shootout occurs 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 loads Emilia in 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 flys 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 is going to 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 and 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 taking part in creating the nonprofit organization to find missing cartel victims was her way of providing a good contribution back into society and making up/letting go of her time being in the cartel.
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 as a way to portray the events and emotion that I witnessed in watching this film.
A few gripes and critiques that I have about this film is 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 in 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 of 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 is 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 finding out the “death” of Manitas in the news, as well as the emotions the kids felt.
Once again, it makes sense and is very understandable that Zoe Saldaña won awards 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 of whether or not the nominations are well-deserved. Of course, the only way we will find out which Oscars awards Emilia Pérez may win is by watching the actual award ceremony.
Overall, I give this film 2.5 stars.