Emilia Pérez review: 'bonkers' musical about a transitioning Mexican cartel boss

"Well, this is unexpected," said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Veteran French director Jacques Audiard (Un prophète) takes "arguably the biggest gamble of his career with the eccentric, genre-bending, Spanish-language musical Emilia Pérez".

Set in Mexico, it touches on such weighty themes as cartel violence and "the epidemic levels of disappearances in the country, as well as gender reassignment surgery and transitioning" – via the medium of "endearingly shoddy song and dance numbers". Zoe Saldaña stars as Rita, a brilliant lawyer who is offered $2 million by notorious cartel boss "Manitas" Del Monte (Karla Sofía Gascón) to help him transition. He has realised that "not only was he born into the wrong body, but also the wrong life", and he believes that as a woman named Emilia Pérez, he will be able to leave "cartel culture" behind for ever.

The songs won't leave you "humming on the way home", but the film is a "riotously entertaining one-off", and it feels "genuinely fresh and new". This year's Cannes audiences and juries "fell hard" for Emilia Pérez, "bowled along by the fearlessness and audacity of the world's first transgender Mexican cartel musical", said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. But I'm afraid I wasn't convinced. The film is "bonkers, but not in a good way – in a way that leaves you scratching your head going, why is this film even a musical?"

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Some viewers will hate this movie, which also features the pop star Selena Gomez, as it veers "from karaoke to kidnapping", said Tim Robey in The Telegraph. Yet Audiard's achievement is to make such an "overblown mélange into something amazingly confident – it's clever, earnest, ridiculous, knowing, forceful", and deeply eccentric. "It's hard to believe he pulls it off, but he does."