Jacques Audiard’s Emilia Pérez is as audacious as a mariachi band crashing a funeral—loud, theatrical, and unapologetically strange. A Spanish crime saga, a gender transition tale, and a musical all rolled into one. It dares to stage its most heartfelt moments amid cartel violence and soaring choruses. That it mostly works is a testament to Audiard’s filmmaking instincts, even if the result is a jarring, sometimes uneven blend of tones.

The premise alone is a fever dream: a feared Mexican drug lord, Manitas del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón), trades his gold-plated teeth braces for lip gloss, leaving behind his criminal empire to become Emilia Pérez. It’s a reinvention that shakes up not just the character’s life but also the film’s narrative form. This isn’t merely about a violent man seeking atonement; it’s about how identity, morality, and personal transformation collide in the most improbable ways. The way the film presents this odyssey in song is both its boldest move and its most unwieldy one.

Audiard’s decision to reinvent the narrative into a musical is a high-stakes gamble. The songs, composed by Clément Ducol and Camille, range from poignant to bombastic, with moments of lyrical introspection punctuated by full-blown theatrical set pieces. Sometimes, the music elevates the emotions; other times, it undercuts the gravity of the material, making the spectacle feel like the American television crime drama - Narcos had a fling with the film Les Misérables in a neon-lit cabaret. A key number, “La Vaginoplastia,” is so flamboyantly bizarre it teeters between genius and absurdity, a line the film frequently walks.

At the heart of it all is Karla Sofía Gascón, whose performance is magnetic. She infuses Emilia with dignity, regret, and a yearning for a life she was long denied. Emilia’s transition is handled with an earnestness that sidesteps exploitative pitfalls. However, the film’s reluctance to engage with her past sins in any substantial depth leaves a gaping moral blind spot. Can a drug kingpin reinvent herself as a humanitarian without reckoning with the blood on her hands? Emilia Pérez wants to answer that question through melody rather than rigid, ethical terms.

Zoe Saldaña, as the weary yet fiercely intelligent lawyer Rita, provides the film’s emotional anchor. Caught in a whirlwind of crime, transformation, and redemption, Rita undergoes an evolution- that is just as compelling as Emilia’s.

Meanwhile, Selena Gomez’s Jessi, Emilia’s estranged wife, is given little to do beyond singing her heart out and wrestling with conflicting emotions when faced with her ex-husband’s new identity. The subplot involving her romance with Édgar Ramírez’s Gustavo feels undercooked, a minor diversion in a film already bursting at the seams.

Ultimately, Emilia Pérez is a film that thrives on contradiction— grave yet surreal, profound yet playful. It is both an ambitious work of reinvention and a narrative balancing act that occasionally wobbles under its sheer complexity. Whether you see it as a masterstroke or a misfire will depend on your tolerance for its high-wire theatrics. But one thing is sure: there’s nothing else quite like it.