A 'Kiss' Before Dying
A review of 'Kiss of the Spider Woman,' a movie with heart, even if it doesn't stick the landing
October 19, 2025
In Kiss of the Spider Woman, Jennifer Lopez has said she’s found the role she was born to play.
It begs the question: Just because you were born to play it, does that mean we were born to watch it?
The Bill Condon-directed movie musical, adapted from the 1993 Broadway show by John Kander, Fred Ebb and Terrence McNally — itself adapted from the Oscar-winning 1985 film, which was spawned by the 1983 stage play, which came from the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig — is a surprise bomb at the box office so far, grossing next to nothing in the U.S. on a $30M budget. Is it a case of J.Loverexposure? Or is the film’s charged political nature and sensitive portrayal of a trans person too much for 2025 to bear?
Or is it just plain bad?
The film focuses on Molina (Tonatiuh), described as a gay Argentine window dresser, who is imprisoned for public indecency in the early ‘80s. The unapologetically flamboyant dreamer, who spends his time obsessing over vintage movies — especially those starring Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez) — is given a new cellmate in Valentín (Diego Luna), a dissident their jailers hope to crack in order to extract information as the country’s infamous Dirty War rages on.
A good revolutionary, Valentín is not overly vexed at sharing close quarters with a homosexual, but it takes him a while to warm up to Molina’s plan to narrate the plot of a camp movie-within-the-movie, The Kiss of the Spider Woman, while stars Luna in a dual role as both a long-suffering Lana Turner type and as the mysterious, lethal title character, the exotic Spider Woman.
If you’re keeping track, that means Lopez is playing an actress, as well as an actress playing two parts. While this should provide her with a meaty challenge, it mostly falls flat because while Lopez handles the film’s dancer numbers with aplomb and is a serviceable singer, she is never, ever anything more or less than JENNIFER LOPEZ. She possesses none of the Spider Woman’s androgynous star power (as did her stage predecessor, the late Chita Rivera) and is — as one of the film’s producers — too worried about looking beautiful to deliver any layers.
Probably this criticism lands on Condon’s shoulders, but for me, the Old Hollywood scenes, which seem to be going for Technicolor, look Barbie-bright, and Lopez’s face bears the signs of so much post-production every close-up took me out of the narrative.
I may be too sensitive to the tricks employed to make Lopez, 56, look 40, but it’s only because she is already a beautiful woman who could have passed for 40 with less brusque photography. Plus, the obvious use of such techniques made those sequences seem far removed from 1940s and 1950s glam.
But while J.Lo falls disappointingly flat, Tonatiuh is the actor with a part about which he could more believably say he was born to play. As Molina, he is exquisitely relatable as a gay man who refuses to grow up in such an ugly world, who introduces a new friend to his escape mechanism and who pays the price when he decides to fully interact with reality.
To his credit, Molina does take that plunge, and in so doing becomes a heroic figure, a far cry from the much more morally ambiguous portrayal of the character by William Hurt, who shocked Hollywood by taking home the Oscar for it in 1986.
Luna is also effective as Valentín, particularly when striving to seem healthy in spite of being poisoned by guards who hope to remove him to someplace more private for a little one-on-one time. The fear of torture and death haunt this film, a cleverly cruel undertone for a movie whose MGM-style song-and-dance numbers aspire to inspire.
I would argue it is the film’s commitment to depicting the horror of war along with the pleasures of fantasy elevate it beyond status as a standard prison drama, if not by much.
By the film’s end, it’s clear that Molina isn’t merely gay, but likely trans — or non-binary, as is Tonatiuh in real life (using he/him and they/them pronouns) — an innovation from the stage version. And while it might read as if I disliked this film up to this point, I would say that watching the denouement, powered by this exciting actor and his stellar singing voice, made the entire two hours and eight minutes worthwhile.
Tonatiuh is the person we need to be eyeballing as a potential generational talent.
I would also encourage you to give Kiss of the Spider Woman a watch in light of the unabashed success of Ryan Murphy’s one-note, gleefully inaccurate, exploitative Netflix hit Monster: The Ed Gein Story.
While Ed Gein is based on a true story, as we should all know by now, there are countless true (and made-up) stories to tell, so which ones we choose to take the time to tell is, well, telling. At a time when queer culture, particularly trans identity, is under attack, Murphy ghoulishly wades into the life of Gein (Charlie Hunnam), inventing many aspects of it self-indulgently, including indelibly cringe-inducing scenes featuring real-life serial killer Richard Speck (Tobias Jelinek) getting railed, his estrogen-induced breasts knocking together. The images are clearly meant to evoke disgust, and are hardly excused by a brief sequence — totally fabricated — in which Gein chats with trans icon Christine Jorgensen (Alanna Darby) and is told he can’t be trans himself because trans women aren’t violent.
My point is that when we have members of our own community fantasizing about the worst of us, it’s never a losing game to focus or to at least also take in work from members of our own community fantasizing about the best of us. And while this latest take on Kiss of the Spider Woman is imperfect, Bill Condon and Tonatiuh are doing nothing if not that.
Kiss of the Spider Woman is in theaters now. Stream music from the film here. Original soundtrack here. ⚡️