Logan Kenny’s review published on Letterboxd:
This review may contain spoilers.
you learn nothing about Emilia’s relationship to womanhood outside of a minute of admiring herself post surgery. you learn nothing about Emilia’s sentience or years of existing as a woman, because her existence only matters in terms of her life pre-transition. she is never given a moment of real interiority or direction or purpose beyond her relationship with her pre-transition self. she fucking gets burnt alive after getting deadnamed and misgendered in the emotional climax of the movie, alongside her wife who is also set ablaze, before a memorialising song with the lyrics “to she who will never come back, to she who kept her secret.” Saldana’s character gets the children she wants, culminating an arc that started with Emilia saying she’d “buy whatever father she wanted”, which in turn perpetuates the nature of Emilia as not a woman but a man pretending. evil! this film is hateful and cruel and demeaning and not nearly trashy enough. it is a cluttered disaster that pivots from disgusting musical numbers, to dreary and underwritten cartel drama, to fucking inexplicable Oscar bait weepiness. and it’s too fucking unimaginative and boring to commit to being fully trashy. the second act of this picture is so fucking boring. I can’t believe I’m saying this but I would have actually respected it a bit more if it committed entirely to the grotesque musical elements, because at least that would be a fucking ethos! its subliminal, nasty transphobia is sickening to watch and made me feel deeply upset. it is ashamed of the trashy, transphobic musical elements that it brings to the table in the first place, and abandons them (and its ostensible protagonist) in the pursuit of tarnished respectability, which somehow reflects how little it sees its protagonist as a woman even harder than the vaginoplasty song. it is utterly contemptible. can’t wait for it to win Best Picture because the world is evil and stupid. at least the climax looks like the final boss fight in Uncharted Drake’s Fortune.
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