A Heartfelt Queer Musical With A Breakout Performance

As the films of 2024 alone have demonstrated, there’s still a good amount of confusion about how a movie musical should function in our modern age. Even 2016’s “La La Land,” the film that ended up bringing back the popularity of the movie musical in a big way, wasn’t interested in fully leaning into its ode to the movie musicals of classic Hollywood, using it instead as a jumping off point, a wry commentary on the subgenre and cinema itself. Since then, it’s felt like each new movie musical has had to find some offbeat justification for its existence: this one is a multi-part blockbuster event (“Wicked”), this one is an anti-musical musical (“Emilia Pérez”), this one has a monkey in it (“Better Man”), and so on. Even “Chicago” director Rob Marshall, who for many years seemed to willfully bear the torch of keeping the more traditional movie musical alive, has recently been relegated to Disney sequels and live-action remakes.

Thankfully, we don’t have to go far to look for another filmmaker who’s interested in keeping a more classical form of the movie musical alive. While someone like Michael Gracey points the way to the genre’s potential future, Bill Condon is still around to prove that the movie musical isn’t broke, and there’s no need to fix it. The writer of “Chicago,” co-writer of Gracey’s “The Greatest Showman,” and director of “Dreamgirls,” Condon has brought his considerable talents to bear on “Kiss of the Spider Woman.” With the film, Condon seems to directly address the continuing debate about musicals in general (not just movie musicals) regarding what their tone and content should be. “Spider Woman” sees Condon use the source material to make a film that’s simultaneously lavish, frivolous entertainment and a rich, grounded drama, with the two sides feeding each other instead of canceling each other out. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a capital-M Musical, and it’s one of the finest examples of the form.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the latest adaptation of the 1976 novel of the same name by Manuel Puig, which was first turned into a non-musical feature film in 1985 by director Héctor Babenco, starring William Hurt and Raul Julia. Although that movie shifted the novel’s setting of Argentina to Brazil, it retained Puig’s concept of featuring a couple (fictional) movies within the movie, and stuck to the novel’s plot of two prisoners influencing each other during their captivity pretty closely. The 1992 musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and book by Terrence McNally flattened the novel and film’s magical realism somewhat, making the movies-within-a-movie more of a visualization of the prisoner’s escapist fantasies, a conceit that allowed the story to play better on stage.

With his “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Condon brings the best of all of the previous adaptations together. Set in the early 1980s in Argentina during that country’s Dirty War, Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a homosexual convicted of misconduct with a minor, is moved into the cell of Marxist revolutionary Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna), and the two men couldn’t be more different at first. Molina approaches life with apolitical verve, while Valentin is fiercely committed to his chosen cause. As a way of passing the time and finding some kind of escape from their bleak and humdrum daily life in prison, Molina begins recounting one of his favorite movies to Valentin, a cheesy 1950s musical entitled “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” starring his favorite classic Hollywood star, Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). As the government officials begin to torture Valentin and manipulate Molina in order to obtain more information about the underground resistance movement Valentin belongs to, Molina’s retelling of the film increasingly begins to take on a resemblance to his and Valentin’s various predicaments.

From that description, one might assume that the film’s musical numbers are relegated to the movie-within-a-movie, but Condon is also riffing on the same conceit he used in “Chicago,” where some musical numbers also take place in the “real” world as part of Molina’s fantasies, an idea closer to the stage version of “Spider Woman.” It’s a rather ingenious choice, as it allows for the musical numbers to have as much extravagance and glitz as possible without ever undercutting or trivializing the drama at the core of the film. Even though Condon’s aesthetic and compositional choices are pretty rote — classic Hollywood staging for the movie-within-a-movie and fantasy sequences, hand-held immediacy for the “real world” material — the blend works, with the contrast between the styles only increasing one’s appreciation for both.

With the way that “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is structured, there are at least two (if not three) separate realms with their own plotlines, and versions of the three main characters appear in each. This means that the three leads have their work cut out for them in terms of delineating their various characters (or at least various versions of the same character), and Lopez, Luna, and Tonatiuh all deliver on that front. Of the three, Luna is the most unsurprisingly reliable, able to slide effortlessly from his suave macho hero in the ’50s world to his ’80s machismo-poisoned revolutionary prisoner, and while he may not be the most powerful singer, he carries himself off well. Lopez, by contrast, reliably brings her acumen for singing and dancing to her role, though her popstar style occasionally grates against Kander and Ebb’s demanding, labyrinthine vocal melodies. Where Lopez excels is in subtly emulating the melodrama of the ’50s B-movie and Hollywood musical; there’s a deliciously distinct difference between her “main” character of Aurora and the Spider Woman, and Lopez uses the conceit that she’s playing these parts while playing a third, unseen part of the fictional actress (if not Molina’s version of her) as a way to justify her campiness.

Really, though, the movie belongs to Tonatiuh, who delivers a performance that’s staggeringly heartfelt. William Hurt’s Molina was a visibly tortured soul in the ’85 film, a man caught between his emotions and his common sense. Tonatiuh’s Molina is more of a pure hearted person, an open wound who can’t help but believe in love even when things are at their darkest. There’s a world of difference between Tonatiuh’s yearning as Molina and his arch deviousness as a character in the “Spider Woman” movie, but through it all, the actor has an undeniable magnetism that’s absolutely riveting. It’s a good thing that “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is essentially built around him, because without his work, it would be a much lesser film.

What Condon has done with “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is pretty remarkable, considering how easily it could’ve fallen apart. It’s a musical that never apologizes for being a musical. It’s a heavy-handed political drama which never feels preachy. It’s an unabashedly queer film which makes its statements about queerness and gender without ever acting like it’s being profound or revolutionary. For all of the movie’s size and scope, it feels surprisingly unadorned.

That’s likely due to how Condon approaches the material with such honest affection. The man who began his career co-writing “Strange Behavior” and directing “Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh” clearly has an affinity for genre films, which can be seen in everything from the “She”-like depiction of the Spider Woman to the way one musical number directly emulates the dream ballet from “The Band Wagon.” As such, he innately understands how genre can reinforce grounded themes rather than distract from or trivialize them. Like the best filmmakers, Condon hasn’t made a movie which requires you to already love the things he does, but instead translates that love to as wide a group of people as possible. 

“Kiss of the Spider Woman,” at its core, is a story about love’s ability to transcend gender, politics, death, and even reality. After all, don’t most of us get caught up in the emotions between fictional people? It’s the whole reason we’re fans of cinema. Yes, the movies can be an escape, but they can also be a tool, a delivery system that can be a force for good. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a big kiss of a movie, one so genuinely loving that it’s hard not to swoon.

/Film Rating: 9 out of 10

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” premiered at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. It does not have an official release date yet.