The Lush Allure and Frustrating Flaws in a Kiss

Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) is the kind of movie that keeps slipping through your fingers just as you think you’ve got it pinned down. 

As a film musical adaptation, it isn’t content to simply restage the material; it wants to dazzle you, overwhelm you, and seduce you into its world. 

It weaves a visually sumptuous web of musical intrigue, setting tragic intimacy against lush fantasy, and at its best it genuinely finds beauty in tragedy. 

At the same time, the very excess that makes it so intoxicating also exposes some nagging narrative and pacing flaws that, by the end, bothered me to distraction.

The story still hinges on the unlikely bond between two men in a nameless, oppressive regime. Valentín, a political prisoner, is locked in a small cell with Molina, convicted for public indecency. Valentín is all hard edges and ideology; Molina survives on romance, memory, and the intoxicating glow of cinema. To cope with the brutality of their confinement, Molina recounts the plot of a grand Hollywood musical starring the glamorous Ingrid Luna, and the movie constantly crosscuts between the cold reality of the prison and the fever-dream spectacle of Ingrid’s world. 

That tension-between dank walls and glittering proscenium, between torture and tap shoes-is the pulse of this adaptation.

As Valentín, Tonatiuh Elizarraraz is the film’s major discovery. On the page, he’s the archetypal political radical, sceptical of Molina, suspicious of fantasy, and perpetually on guard. But Tonatiuh plays him with a slow, accumulating softness that makes his transformation feel earned rather than schematic. Early on, he holds himself like a clenched fist; over time, you start to see the strain in his eyes, the hesitation in his voice, the tiny cracks in his certainty. When he finally surrenders, even momentarily, to the comfort of Molina’s retold musical, the film finds its emotional centre. 

It’s the kind of performance that quietly announces a talent you’re going to be seeing a lot more of.

Diego Luna’s Molina is a different kind of achievement. It’s a role that could easily float away into pure camp, but Luna never lets that happen. He embraces Molina’s theatricality-the delicate gestures, the breathy enthusiasm, the unabashed love for Ingrid Luna’s world-while always letting you glimpse the vulnerability and fear underneath. 

His musical numbers, especially when the prison setting starts bleeding into the fantasy, are where the film really clicks: the choreography becomes both performance and defence mechanism, the colour and movement a shield against despair. You feel that every flourish is, on some level, an act of survival.

Jennifer Lopez, as Ingrid Luna, is the film’s purest incarnation of spectacle. She doesn’t so much enter the frame as take it over. Swathed in sumptuous gowns, framed in soft light and swirling smoke, she turns every number into an event. Lopez knows exactly how to hit her marks-vocally, physically, and emotionally-and the production clearly builds entire sequences around her magnetism. 

Whenever the movie plunges fully into Ingrid’s musical universe, you can feel the temperature rise: this is where the costume design, lighting, and choreography all hit a shared high.

Visually, the film is often stunning. The contrast between the washed-out, claustrophobic prison and the hyper-saturated fantasy sequences is sharp and deliberate. 

But the same impulses that make the movie so rich to look at also create its biggest problems. The structure leans heavily on the fantasy numbers, and not all of them feel dramatically necessary. 

Too often, you sense the story taking a back seat so the production can indulge in another elaborate set piece. When the musical sequences deepen Molina and Valentín’s connection, or mirror the power dynamics of the prison, they’re inspired. When they exist mostly to showcase design and choreography, the pacing drags. You can feel the energy leaking out of the core relationship, which is exactly where it shouldn’t.

Tonal balance is another issue. The jump from political imprisonment and bodily vulnerability to glossy dream ballet is meant to be sharp, that’s the point, but the film doesn’t always manage those shifts cleanly. 

Sometimes the contrast lands like a gut punch: a lyrical dance abruptly undercut by the sound of a guard’s boots, or a romantic song choked off by a coughing fit back in the cell. 

At other times, the transitions feel more like channel changes, as if you’ve momentarily wandered into a different movie. 

The ambition is admirable; the consistency is not.

Even Ingrid Luna, as embodied by Lopez, is a double-edged sword. She’s astonishing to watch, and the film knows it, but Ingrid rarely resolves into more than an idealized projection. That can be defended on thematic grounds-she is, after all, Molina’s constructed icon, not a flesh-and-blood person-yet the movie sometimes seems more interested in celebrating Jennifer Lopez the star than interrogating Ingrid the symbol.

Those sequences are gorgeous, but occasionally hollow, and in a story that’s fundamentally about the cost and necessity of fantasy, that hollowness matters.

So, you end up with a film that constantly hovers between transcendence and frustration. 

On one side of the scale: a bold reimagining of a classic, anchored by three compelling performances, especially Tonatiuh’s breakout turn; a visual package that delivers on the promise of cinematic spectacle; and a sincere attempt to explore how imagination and art can be lifelines in the darkest circumstances. 

On the other, a sagging midsection, uneven pacing, and a tendency to prioritise surface over emotional through-line at precisely the wrong moments.

By the time the credits roll, it’s hard not to feel torn. Kiss of the Spider Woman (2025) absolutely works in flashes-sometimes in whole scenes, sometimes in entire numbers- and those flashes are bright enough that you want to champion it. 

But the cumulative weight of its structural and rhythmic missteps keeps nudging it back from greatness. 

In the end, it walks a very fine line between flop and top, and for me, that line is so thin that a single extra cut, or one fewer indulgent fantasy sequence, might have tipped it decisively. 

As it stands, it’s a beautiful, uneven web: mesmerizing to look at, emotionally resonant in places, but just tangled enough that you can feel where it snagged.

Showing in South African cinemas from January 2, 2026.

-Dirk Lombard Fourie