Musicals as a concept can be a tough sell. If you’re trying to tell a serious story, having characters just break into song can completely destroy your narrative momentum. But using a musical as a distraction from your real story is tricky too since you’re using lots of movie time to manufacture your premise. This is my roundabout way of praising 2025’s Kiss of the Spiderwoman, threading the needle and pulling off a big musical win.
This musical remake of a movie adaptation of a novel drops us into Argentina’s Proceso de Reorganización Nacional military dictatorship. There Luis Molina (Tonatiuh) is arrested for public indecency due to his homosexuality. He’s assigned to a cell with Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna), an intellectual revolutionary being tortured for information. Molina, trying to cheer up the nearly broken Valentin, discuss his love of Hollywood movies. Specifically one movie, Kiss of the Spider Woman, featuring the great Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez) in an old school 1940s movie musical romance for the ages.
Bill Condon directs this film. You know, the guy who did Chicago and Dreamgirls. We’re in capable hands here, and it shows immediately. Contrast is Condon’s playground where his story takes off. Molina and Valentin’s cell is completely desaturated, filled with blues and greys. It’s a lifeless place designed to suck the life out of even the most determined person. So how do you escape a place like that? In the mind. Molina’s retelling of the 1940s movie almost blinds you with its Technicolor. Every dress, location, moonlight, comes with the purest luscious version you could imagine of that color. Like our prisoners, I felt transported when the movie “started up” again, a necessary reprieve to build up the strength to deal with the growing terrors of their real predicament.
All 3 leads give something the other can’t as well to keep the story exciting. Jennifer Lopez gets top billing, but really she’s the figment of both men’s imaginations. She’s asked to only be who she already is: a pin-up Hollywood queen who can dance better than everyone else, and in that she succeeds pretty effortlessly. She’s so wonderfully the opposite of Diego Luna’s Valentin. He’s also in familiar territory, playing an unexpected love triangle in the middle of a revolution. He’s the real acting vet of this movie, grounding it in the gravitas of the real world, translating the revolutionary fight into relatable emotional complexity only great actors like he could. His repartee with Tonatiuh is excellent, undercutting all the dreamer’s points with direct real world clap backs, giving the film a nice if dark, comedic edge. Speaking of Tonatiuh, what an announcement! He’s the big winner here, sauntering into both worlds and living them with aplomb. Everything he does is magic, and you can’t take your eyes off him everytime he’s onscreen: the birth of a new movie star.
So in a movie season dominated by Wicked and Bruce Springsteen, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a nice reminder that there’s other ways to make a musical. And some of the old ones, when done right, never go out of style. Even better, you can clean up some of the old faults like this movie does, reminding everyone that homosexuality was always present, just more hidden in plain sight, some of the best jokes this movie has to offer.