While I think some of the negative reviews are definitely from transphobes, on places like Letterboxd at least, many of the very negative reviews seem from the perspective of trans allies or trans people and there's a whole section in its wikipedia page about criticism from the LGBT community.Dubrow555 wrote: Sun Mar 16, 2025 1:03 pm This is really sad to me. I'm disappointed that this forum wants to punish EP for essentially being "review-bombed" by loads of people who hate trans people.
Fwiw, here's one of the top reviews of the film on Letterboxd with 23k.
A look at the most popular reviews on Letterboxd will show you other reviews in a similar vain (along with the one-liners you'll find on every other film, obviously). If anything most of the film's criticism is due to people considering it transphobic and/or xenophobic.
so alienated from the experience of lived trans identity that it gets many basic facts wrong, stuff that any trans person could tell you about (for one thing, emilia pérez wouldn't 'smell like a man' if she was on HRT, as hormones have a massive effect on body odor). but even disregarding that, this is yet another crash-esque panorama of trying to tackle every societal problem and then acting as if the mere effort of that attempt, rather than the actual result, is profound. liberal-centrists can seemingly only understand queerness as 'the exceptional' to their 'normality', so they make a hyperbolic spectacle out of us and then go on to say that it's good optics, that it's 'representation', when in fact it is abstraction and dehumanization -- emilia pérez is made to represent so many contradictory things that in the end the film situates her as an icon rather than a real person, it is a crude mystification of everything the film claims to care about. and none of this is to mention the fact that director audiard films his musical in the most patronizing academicist way, an empty grab-bag of techniques with no decisive point-of-view (the split-screen sequence near the climax is particularly punishing).
what emilia pérez offers is not meaning, but the sensation of supposedly meaningful things moving in rapid succession, and it hopes the resulting blur will pass by quick enough that we do not notice the superficiality of its style -- in other words, a perfect film for awards season.
That's not to say that I might not have underestimated its audience reception a little bit, but it's something to keep in mind.
