“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the Gay, Latinx Musical We Need

Tonatiuh and Diego Luna appear in Kiss of the Spider Woman by Bill Condon, an official selection of the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

I went into Kiss of the Spider Woman blind. I’d heard of the 1985 film (as an editor here), but I’d never watched it or seen the Broadway version. Still I was excited, if a little apprehensive to see the Sundance-endorsed musical starring Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, and Tonatiuh. It premiered at the festival’s biggest venue and I sat far in the back, thousands of people between me and JLo, director Bill Condon, and breakout star Tonatiuh.

As the film started, I got situated in the premise. We’re in 1980s Argentina, where the military dictatorship is disappearing thousands of its own citizens. Tonatiuh plays prisoner Luis Molina, jailed for being gay. He’s transferred to a new cell with Luna’s Valentin Arregui. Valentin’s a hardscrabble political prisoner, facing torture and worse. The two men start off uneasy with each other to the point where Valentin physically hurts Molina. But, of course, they begin to bond, particularly as Molina recounts his favorite film The Kiss of the Spider Woman, as a way for both men to escape, if only in their imaginations.

As audience members, we experience the fictional film-within-the-film as bright and fully realized. JLo is the star – she sings and dances and wears plenty of fun wigs and costumes. Her world is colorful and campy, a stark contrast to the prison. Molina casts himself and his cellmate in the musical, so Luna and Tonatiuh are in tuxedos one moment and their dirty underwear the next.

It’s weird. The changes in tone and lighting are so severe that by the second act of the film, I was pretty worried. Was this, expensive, fancy Latinx-led vehicle going to bomb? Emotionally, it was hard to toggle between the two realms and care about both versions of the characters.

I’m not going to spoil anything, but they turned it around in the final third, connecting all the threads and building to a powerful emotional climax that completely worked. I was transfixed and so was the audience with me. No one left early and everyone rose to applaud afterwards. Kiss of the Spider Woman is going to be the film to talk about this year, although I bet reactions will vary.

Not about Tonatiuh, though. Coming from lesser-known projects like Promised Land and Vida, he more than holds his own against his more famous co-stars. He’s the star of this film and his journey is beautiful to behold, thanks to Tonatiuh’s ability to manage the film’s various tones, not to mention sing and dance. The 30-year-old has some serious pipes on him.

Jennifer Lopez’s performance works for me. Her vocals sound good and her character is campy, dressed up in a bunch of fabulous costumes with slits, habitually, above her bloomers. But that’s what JLo does – look beautiful, show her stuff, and exist on an over-the-top plane. Will there be haters? For sure, there always are. But this is the exact right part for the mogul and she (and Bill Condon) know it. I mean, she wore a spider dress to the premiere.

Now, Luna has so much goodwill, we’ve all been praising him since 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También. And he’s totally believable as Valentin, his progression matching Molina’s in terms of depth, distance, and grace. But if you watch The Book of Life like I recently did, you’ll remember that hermano can’t sing. He thankfully has only one song in Kiss of the Spider Woman, which he quickly pushes through. We’ll all just have to ignore it.

My guess is that, singing aside, they’ll all be up for awards. If we learned anything in 2024, it’s that the Academy loves musicals helmed by white guys about other communities. That Kiss of the Spider Woman also is unabashedly queer and Latinx, puts it in conversation with this year’s controversial but celebrated Emilia Pérez.

Thankfully, Kiss of the Spider Woman is authentically ours in a way this year’s awards juggernaut is not. For one, it’s based on a novel by actual Latino Manuel Puig. It’s also grounded in reality – a specific time and place – in a way that Jacques Audiard’s fever dream is not. It helps that as a gay man, if not a Latino, Condon has some closeness to his subject. At the very least, the 2025 Sundance stunner does no harm – something Emilia Pérez cannot claim.

When Condon introduced the film at the premiere, he read this sentence from a recent White House statement: “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.” Then Condon stood in defiance of that bigotry, declaring that his film, the compelling musical to follow, would take an entirely different approach and celebrate queer gender identities. And it does, for all its weirdness Kiss of the Spider Woman is ultimately a triumph about the ways we love art, each other, and ourselves. It’s the queer Latinx musical we’ve been needing. Saddle up.

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