‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ Review: Jennifer Lopez’s Odd Meta-Musical

Cinema has long been a mirror for political repression, and in Bill Condon’s Kiss of the Spider Woman, that mirror is adorned with glittering sequins, drenched in melancholy, and distorted by the very power structures it aims to critique. A reimagining of Manuel Puig’s 1976 novel (and its stage musical adaptation and Oscar-winning 1985 film), this 2025 film leans into its meta-musical structure, shifting between the grim realities of an Argentine prison in 1981 and the dazzling escapism of Golden Age Hollywood pastiche. It is both a story about survival and a meditation on the ways cinema itself becomes a survival mechanism — how film can be a salve for oppression, a tool of control, or, sometimes, an act of resistance.

But Kiss of the Spider Woman is also a film struggling to find its own footing. Despite a fascinating premise, a powerhouse cast led by Jennifer Lopez, Diego Luna, and Tonatiuh, and a deliberate engagement with Argentina’s Dirty War, the film never fully decides what it wants to be: an intimate character study, a spectacle of camp and tragedy, or a grand statement on the intersections of film, queerness, and political violence. The result is an ambitious but uneven musical that never quite lands its most potent ideas.

The Prison as Cinema, the Cell as Stage

Kiss of the Spider Woman

2.5
/5

Release Date

January 26, 2025

Runtime

128 minutes

Director

Bill Condon

Writers

Bill Condon, Manuel Puig

Producers

Barry Josephson, Ben Affleck, Benny Medina, Diego Luna, Elaine Goldsmith-Thomas, Jennifer Lopez, Kevin Halloran, Matt Damon, Sam Weisman, Greg Yolen, Michael Joe, Tom Kirdahy, Pamela Thur, Dani Bernfeld

Cast

• 
• 

  Tonatiuh Elizarraraz

  Luis Molina

Pros & Cons

• The film embraces classical Hollywood aesthetics with lush cinematography, melodramatic lighting, and grand musical numbers that evoke Rita Hayworth-era glamour.
• Lopez delivers a mesmerizing performance as the elusive Spider Woman, capturing old-school movie iconography with elegance and precision.
• The film raises intriguing questions about the role of film as both a form of resistance and repression, particularly in the context of Argentina?s dictatorship.

• The emotional connection between Valentin and Molina feels rushed rather than fully earned.
• Shifting between campy musical spectacle and heavy political drama creates a tonal dissonance that undermines its impact.
• While it nods to Argentina?s Dirty War, the film never fully engages with its historical context.

The film opens in May 1983, two months before the fall of Argentina’s military dictatorship. The framing is stark: an overhead view of the prison, a cold structure that, despite its rigidity, holds within it a world governed by its own rules. This prison society is brutal, a microcosm of Argentina’s political repression. Luis Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay window dresser imprisoned for “corrupting” a minor, is at the bottom of its hierarchy—mocked, beaten, and called “a woman” as a form of degradation. Into his cell comes Valentin Arregui (Diego Luna), a Marxist revolutionary, whose body is battered but whose ideological fervor is unbroken. The contrast is immediate: Molina’s world is one of movie-star daydreams and grand performances, Valentin’s is one of grim reality, resistance, and pragmatism.

Related

The Best Jennifer Lopez Movie Is a Sick Fantasy Version of The Silence of the Lambs

In 2000, Jennifer Lopez starred in The Cell, a film that provided an inside look at the twisted mind of a killer, à la The Silence of the Lambs.

Their initial interactions are bristling with class resentment, political dogma, and deeply ingrained prejudices. “Why do you make yourself so trivial?” Valentin sneers, dismissing Molina’s fantasies. For him, movies are an opiate, a distraction fed to the masses by those in power. But for Molina, they are an escape, a way to endure suffering when hope has long been stripped away.

This tension—between escapism and activism, between film as a tool of liberation and film as a tool of repression—is one of the movie’s strongest elements. But instead of fully interrogating this dialectic, Kiss of the Spider Woman leans too heavily into its visual excess, relying on spectacle rather than deepening the ideological clash at the heart of its narrative.

Jennifer Lopez and the Ghost of Golden Age Glamour

Jennifer Lopez is Ingrid Luna, a movie star in Molina’s fantasies who shape-shifts between multiple roles—Aurora, a seductive femme fatale; the Spider Woman, a mythic figure whose kiss is lethal; and a tragic screen siren whose beauty is both her power and her prison. Lopez is luminous, her presence evoking the cinematic grandeur of Rita Hayworth and Ava Gardner, exuding Old Hollywood allure. She is the film’s visual anchor, draped in satin and shadow, her movements choreographed with a precision that reminds us of her strength as a dancer and performer.

Yet, for all her magnetism, she is never more than a projection of the men who imagine her. She exists only in their fantasies—never as a fully realized character, but as a symbol, an avatar for their desires. The film does little to give Ingrid Luna agency outside of being the muse of male longing, making her feel more like a figure from a lavishly staged dream sequence rather than a character integral to the emotional and political stakes of the story.

This choice is deliberate, but it also exposes a critical flaw in the film: Kiss of the Spider Woman is so enamored with its own artifice that it forgets to make us feel the weight of its characters’ realities. The movie-within-a-movie concept works okay as an aesthetic device, but it fails to fully connect to the film’s broader themes of power, repression, and desire.

Related

Sundance 2025 Preview: The Best Movies & Biggest Stars

Take a look at the 40 most anticipated or interesting films coming to the Sundance Film Festival in Jan. 2025.

The Cinematic Language of Oppression

Condon and cinematographer Tobias Schliessler borrow heavily from classical Hollywood techniques, embracing high key lighting, and deliberate framing that evoke the artificial grandeur of 1940s melodrama. Molina’s flashbacks and fantasies are filmed in the style of Technicolor musicals, a stark contrast to the brutal austerity of the prison sequences. The use of black-and-white film stock for newsreel-style segments also reinforces the historical reality of Argentina’s Dirty War, grounding the film in a period of real political terror.

But if the film is meant to be a commentary on the intersection of cinema and authoritarianism, it never fully commits to this idea. The political backdrop remains broad, gesturing at Argentina’s dictatorship rather than interrogating it with specificity. Aside from brief references to state surveillance, torture, and the use of cinema as a propaganda tool, the film doesn’t explore the deeper implications of its setting. At times, the Dirty War feels like a backdrop rather than an essential part of the narrative.

Related

15 Musicals You Can Stream Right Now

These musicals available for streaming right now allow viewers to sing along to the songs from the comfort of their homes.

A Musical That Can’t Find Its Rhythm

Musically, Kiss of the Spider Woman struggles with adaptation. The score by John Kander and Fred Ebb (of Cabaret and Chicago fame) is as lush and theatrical as one would expect, but on screen, it feels oddly muted. The film often plays like a filmed stage musical, with little effort to reimagine numbers in a way that feels cinematic. Where something like Chicago (also adapted by Condon) used the language of film to elevate its theatricality, this version of Kiss of the Spider Woman remains static, its numbers feeling more like interruptions than organic expressions of character.

The chemistry between Diego Luna and Tonatiuh is compelling in concept but lacks the build-up to make their relationship fully resonate. The emotional arc between Valentin and Molina is one of mutual transformation—one teaching the other about love, the other about resistance—but the film rushes through key moments, relying on dialogue-heavy scenes that sometimes feel like exposition dumps rather than lived-in emotional exchanges.

Related

2025 Sundance Award Winners Announced: You Can Watch the Festival’s Best Film’s Now

‘Atropia,’ ‘Zodiac Killer Project,’ ‘Seeds,’ and other new independent movies were big winners the 2025 Sundance Film Festival.

There is also a tension between the film’s camp sensibility and its political ambitions. One moment, the film leans into flamboyant, high-drama excess, and the next, it expects us to grapple with the brutality of torture and political imprisonment. The tonal dissonance makes it difficult to fully immerse in either aspect.

A Beautifully Dressed but Thematically Uncertain Film​​​​​

“To be yourself is an act of rebellion,” Molina tells Valentin, in one of the film’s most overtly didactic moments. But Kiss of the Spider Woman doesn’t always know how to embody that rebellion. It raises powerful ideas about cinema, desire, and political resistance but doesn’t develop them with enough depth to make them land.

In 1983, when Argentina’s dictatorship was crumbling, the real battle was one of memory—of reclaiming the stories that had been erased, of resisting state narratives that sought to rewrite history. Kiss of the Spider Woman gestures toward these stakes but never fully engages with them. Instead, it settles for broad, universally digestible statements on fascism and oppression, ones that, while resonant, feel too generalized to speak to the specific historical moment it portrays.

Ultimately, Kiss of the Spider Woman is a film about longing—for connection, for beauty, for freedom—but it remains trapped in its own glossy dreamscape. It has its moments visually, musically rich, and conceptually ambitious, but like its protagonist, it is caught between fantasy and reality, never quite committing to either. Kiss of the Spider Woman screened at the 2025 Sundance Film Festival. You can find more information here.