‘Emilia Perez’ Is All Outline, No Substance
Still from Emilia Perez. Courtesy of Netflix.
Emilia Pérez opens on hollowed-out dark figures, their outlines flashing in a black abyss. As the camera closes in, we make out what lies within—humans. Mariachis, presumably Mexican; their mouths moving but a hyper-produced, auto-tuned vocal track shrouds their voices. This image aptly reflects the ethos of the film—all outline, no substance.
Directed by Jacques Audiard—a cis, white, French man who doesn’t speak Spanish—Emilia Pérez is a Spanish-language musical ostensibly about a violent Mexican drug lord who transitions to a woman and subsequently turns good. It boasts diversity in its cast and its genre-defying pendulum swings from drama to musical to telenovela to action to thriller. It’s pure spectacle overlayed on narrowly contained subjects. It arrogantly points at issues such as Mexico’s disappeared victims, femicide, and transness, without saying anything about them. It’s a hollow rendering of complex realities shrouded in the trappings of “wokeness.” Naturally, Hollywood loves it.
The film first made a splash at Cannes in May 2024, winning the Jury and Best Actress prizes—the latter of which went to all four of the film’s stars: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, and Adriana Paz. It then scored 10 Golden Globe nominations and walked away with four wins including Best Motion Picture- Musical or Comedy; Best Performance by a Female Actor in a Supporting Role in any Motion Picture for Zoe Saldaña; Best Original Song - Motion Picture for “El Mal”; and Best Motion Picture - Non-English Language. Since January 23, it is also the most Oscar-nominated non-English language film in the awards show’s history. In fact, Emilia Pérez is the most nominated film of the 2025 Academy Awards, with 13 total, including Best Picture.
Despite these accolades, it’s very bad.
The swings in genre aren’t defined enough to land, often suspended, strangely, in no man’s land. The writing is lazy, incurious about its subjects, and draws up a convoluted plot surprising in its sheer absurdity and predictable in its most base interpretations of Mexico and its history. The acting falls flat due to the lack of character development in the script and some serious casting missteps and the music and singing are SNL-level comically terrible.
Since its release on Netflix on November 13, 2024, the film has sparked controversy, namely in the LGBTQ+ community. Many critics, including several trans critics, highlighted the narrow and harmful trans representation. There is already much eloquent criticism out there, and I encourage a deeper dive into how the film failed trans audiences specifically. For example, for The Cut, Harron Walker writes a vital piece that speaks to Audiard’s obvious ignorance of the nuances of the trans experience.
Walker writes, “I expect that a filmmaker so taken by the concept of transitioning, one who’s displayed a certain level of conscious sensitivity in his previous efforts to depict lives unlike his own, to at least display an informed understanding of what that concept actually looks like in practice.”
Audiard didn’t seem to have an informed understanding of any of the subjects he portrayed in Emilia Pérez. In fact, he publicly declared several times that he wasn’t all that interested in learning much about them, either. At a screening of the movie at the 2024 Morelia International Film Festival, Audiard answered how much research on Mexico he had to do for the film by saying, “I didn’t study much. I kinda already knew what I had to understand.”
In an interview for Interview, Audiard spoke of his interest in superficiality over substance when it came to Spanish: “If I don’t speak the language, I have the freedom to just focus on the musicality of the language itself . . . I loved listening to the flow of the music, of the language, and I realized that I just love working when I don’t understand.”
In the same interview, he also mentioned, “I don’t have a deep knowledge of musicals as a genre.”
I am not a person who believes you have to be of the identity of a character you create. But laziness in research of a people, history, experience, or genre you do not know and are attempting to depict not only robs the story of heart but sacrifices potential successful nuance in execution.
Take Anora, a 2024 film about a young woman sex worker from Brooklyn. Sean Baker, a middle-aged white man, directed the movie. Though I’d rather see a film by someone who knows the experience firsthand, Baker’s work isn’t lazy or uninformed. The success of nuance and sheer fun of the film comes from the clear research and attention he and the film’s star, Mikey Madison, paid to the film’s subjects. To develop a compelling story within a world, you have to know it intimately.
Meanwhile, Audiard’s indifference about his film’s subjects resulted in not only a superfluous and insensitive handling of a very real and traumatic ongoing tragedy in Mexico but also casting decisions that left Mexican audiences last in consideration.
Still from Emilia Perez. Courtesy of Netflix.
In December 2024, Mexican actor Eugenio Derbez criticized Gomez’s Spanish in Emilia Pérez. Gomez plays Jessi, the wife of Manitas, the Mexican drug lord who transitions into Emilia Pérez and fakes her own death to be reborn anew. She then tricks Jessi and their children into living with her again pretending to be a cousin of Manitas.
In an episode of the Hablando de Cine Con podcast with host Gaby Meza, Derbez says, “Selena is indefensible. I (watched Emilia Pérez) with people, and every time she had a scene, we looked at each other to say, ‘Wow, what is this?’”
Days later, Gomez responded by tweeting: “I understand where you are coming from. I’m sorry I did the best I could with the time I was given. Doesn’t take away from how much work and heart I put into this movie.” Soon after, Derbez apologized to Gomez for his “careless comments.”
I wished he hadn’t.
As a fluent Spanish speaker who regularly watches Spanish-language content without subtitles, I can attest that Gomez’s Spanish was unintelligible. A Spanish-language film set in Mexico with Mexican characters, being indecipherable to Mexican audiences who will presumably watch the film without subtitles, is an offense that should be called out. It is an outrage.
However, I do think that Gomez should not be the target of the outrage. The affront was not her fault but the fault of the filmmakers who decided she was the correct person for the role of a fluent Spanish speaker in Mexico. It was simply not a role that should have gone to her as an American actor who isn’t fluent in Spanish.
While some have defended Gomez by saying the character is not supposed to speak fluent Spanish (the script lazily and hastily added in a signal that Gomez was maybe American by mentioning that she has a sister in the States), her forced and bizarre pronunciation are incompatible with someone who has two adolescent children who have grown up in Mexico and have native accents. It just doesn’t make sense. If the film wanted to depict a non-fluent speaker, it would’ve signaled more stumbling in her Spanish, but it strangely forced Gomez to deliver all of her Spanish by rote without any English terms mixed in to signal struggling. Regardless, the insult to Mexican audiences buying into a film set in Mexico expecting to understand their native language remains. It is the fault of the director for placing Gomez in this role.
On the podcast, host Meza added: "I feel she doesn’t know what she is saying, and if she doesn’t know what she’s saying, she can’t give her acting any nuance." What Meza is expressing is sound acting insight. And that’s why Gomez’s performance, along with basically every other performance, falls flat. Because whether or not the actors know what they’re saying—the writer-director surely does not.
Still from Emilia Perez. Courtesy of Netflix.
None of Emilia Pérez’s lead cast are from Mexico (I’m going to ignore the publicity team’s last-ditch effort to market Adriana Paz’s character, who we meet well past the halfway point of the movie, as a lead actor). Gascón is from Spain; Saldaña is U.S.-born with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots; and Gomez is from the U.S. with Mexican roots. I don’t necessarily believe actors should only play their own nationalities, but when a Mexico-set film is shot entirely in France and produced by French production companies, it would be nice to find some authentic Mexican representation in front of the camera. But alas, in 2025, that might still be too much to ask.
For the sake of soothing egos, white Hollywood gaslights Latines and Latin Americans into behaving like a monolith not worthy of nuance or even adequate research into a specific culture. Instead, because the lead cast are women of varying degrees of Latinidad, they pat themselves on the back and tell themselves they are doing the good work.
I wish Derbez hadn’t backed down from his stance. As a born and bred Mexican, he has a right to feel confused, offended even. The film chose to pack in American star power to appeal to Hollywood, sacrificing authenticity for prestige. And it worked. But when prestige is so obviously lacking in soul, it’s time to lift the veil and admit the systems we revere are in service to one thing only: themselves.
Diversity initiatives in Hollywood took center stage for a few brief remarks at awards shows, but institutions consistently show a lack of care and curiosity for their diverse audiences.
In an interview with Deadline, Mexican filmmaker Rodrigo Prieto called out basic research left undone in the production of Emilia Pérez: “The whole thing is completely inauthentic . . . You would never have a jail sign that read ‘Cárcel’ it would be ‘Penitenciaria.’ It’s just the details, and that shows me that nobody that knew was involved. And it didn’t even matter.” From the choice of the actors (save for Paz) to the production team to costume designers, 'Emilia Perez' was not a Mexican film. Yet, it is positing itself as such. And worse, benefiting from such associations.
Meanwhile, many Mexican audiences have not seen the film. The movie only became available to Mexicans on January 23, 2025. I suspect this is why negative Mexican criticism has not taken over the conversation yet. And why white, cis audiences and critics and voting bodies have so confidently and proudly sung their praises for this absolute catastrophe. They haven’t come across enough pushback. That’s not to say there are no Mexican critics speaking out against the film. Its Golden Globes sweep and the circulating of a few viral clips—including Gomez’s Spanish—allowed wider Mexican audiences to weigh in.
In his review for RogerEbert.com, U.S.-based, Mexico-born critic Carlos Aguilar writes: “More people will watch Audiard’s vision of a Mexico in turmoil than those of Mexicans, and therein lies a larger concern about which art is championed and which isn’t. For all its prickly aesthetic and thematic components, there’s an enticing lusciousness to Emilia Pérez derived from that over-the-top saturation of hammered-in ideas in combination with dazzling and dizzying imagery. Like synthetic flavoring extracts, there’s no real fruit in them, but the feelings they provoke, positive and negative alike, are true.” I fundamentally disagree with the last part of his statement. The fruit is the thing. Without it, the story is false. If there is no fruit, there is nothing. Latine and Latin American folks existing around the world with only celebrated superficial versions of their humanity in media will fall prey to those who then only see us as less than human.
With such little representation of us in mainstream media, we are conditioned to accept scraps, even if they do more harm than good. The fundamental affront of a cartel musical—adding to the exhaustive canon of glorified narco-culture film and television, most of which comes from non-Latines and non-Latin Americans—is something I’ve completely disregarded so far, for the argument that the film’s creator should’ve done his research.
Selena Gomez, Karla Sofía Gascón, Adriana Paz, and Zoe Saldaña pose on the red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival. Photo by Frank Sun, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
What is more important to point out in all this Emilia Pérez mishmash is that the awards ceremonies we respect and the faceless groups of voters at Cannes, the Golden Globes, the Academy Awards that we so unquestionably trust, are a fallacy. It’s a politically and financially charged charade.
With the millions of dollars it costs for a film to run an Oscar campaign, there’s no way these “bests” can account for the canon of cinema released any given year. So if Emilia Pérez wins Best Picture, we’ll know they’re wrong. And in that knowledge, take back our discernment and seek out stories by auteurs who know what they’re talking about.
Emilia Pérez talks about nothing because there is no heart; there is only shiny surface. And a class of people who won’t and can’t bother to mine more than this will continue to uplift the movie.
Staying critical of commercial successes is vital if we, actual Latinx and Latin Americans want to create change.
Make noise. Don’t settle. And rage against the flashing lights outlining hollow representations that white elites throw at us as if they’re really something. It’s time to question everything, every convention, every structure, every ruling entity. Don’t get complacent; get active. Get frustrated. Get critical. And please don’t praise folks for doing the bare minimum (like casting a trans actress in a trans role). Enough of that. It’s quite enough.
