Skip to content

Emilia Perez

Contact

Lieve Vrouwestraat 13
3811 BP Amersfoort
Plan your route

from your location

Take a look in advance

  • View all media

Rita (Zoë Saldana) is a lawyer from Mexico City who specializes in narco-related cases. She is incredibly good at her job. She is also burned out, tired of seeing her incompetent (read: male) colleagues take credit for victories, and feels that she is seriously undervalued and underpaid. Then her help is sought by Manitas, one of the most vicious drug lords in the cartel world. He thinks Rita can best help him make the transition he craves: becoming a woman.

It is a one-time offer, with a reward of wealth beyond Rita's imagination. She accepts the job and stages his death, giving Manitas time to transition.

Four years later wo...

Rita (Zoë Saldana) is a lawyer from Mexico City who specializes in narco-related cases. She is incredibly good at her job. She is also burned out, tired of seeing her incompetent (read: male) colleagues take credit for victories, and feels that she is seriously undervalued and underpaid. Then her help is sought by Manitas, one of the most vicious drug lords in the cartel world. He thinks Rita can best help him make the transition he craves: becoming a woman.

It is a one-time offer, with a reward of wealth beyond Rita's imagination. She accepts the job and stages his death, giving Manitas time to transition.

Four years later, her help is sought again. She meets Emilia Perez (Karla Sofía Gascón) who wants to be united with her children. Emilia also wants to set up a charity dedicated to finding victims of the drug wars. Thus, it seems that with the transition from man to woman, the homicidal and criminal nature of the beast also disappeared. However, it is not that easy.

Unlike other transgender films, there is no focus on the transition process itself. The focus of the film is on Manitas' life before the surgeries, and a few years later after as Emilia Perez. The film's screenplay is written like an opera libretto. Emilia's story is told with music. Spoken dialogues are interspersed with singing.

Emilia Perez is a musical, crime thriller and soap opera all at the same time. Have you ever seen a movie musical in which the words "mammoplasty, vaginoplasty, rhinoplasty" appear in one song? And in that same movie musical, the drug boss's (ex?) wife (Selena Gomez) sings, "My pussy still hurts when I think of you." (The latter, by the way, sounds a lot more poetic in Spanish.)

When

Location

Go back