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I heard some praise for Emilia Perez but never paid it much attention until it beat Wicked at the Golden Globes. Even at that point it didn’t quite register that it was a musical.

A few weeks later, as I scrolled through Netflix, I saw it come up. Remembering the title, I clicked on it and experienced surprise when it was categorized as a musical. I’d already forgotten the aforementioned victory. The description also included “genre defying.” That certainly piqued my interest.

To be frank, although even now I don’t know what I expected, Emilia Perez is nothing like I anticipated. It is a musical, to be sure, but it is so, so much more.

Honestly, the less you know about the movie the more likely you are to enjoy it. However, if you’d like to keep reading, I am going to spoil aspects of the plot. (But never the ending, of course.)

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First of all, it becomes apparent very quickly that this is a film spoken in Spanish. It then becomes obvious that this is indeed a musical, and the songs are in Spanish as well. These are not happy-go-lucky songs. They are intense, angry, guttural, and passionate, yet still beautiful.

The film primarily takes place in Mexico, and Zoe Saldana plays Rita, a lawyer who can’t quite rise to the next level. Frustrated, she accepts a mysterious offer to meet someone who promises to make her rich. At the rendezvous point, she has a bag thrown over her head and she is kidnapped. After a long ride, she finds herself sitting before an infamous and extremely violent drug cartel lord. He makes a request of her. He needs her to travel the world in order to find a discreet doctor who can perform a sex change operation on him. He reveals that despite the fact he is married with two children, he has always been a woman in his soul, and he’s tired of hiding. By the way, this scene is deadly serious, full of dread, and we absolutely believe Rita could find herself murdered if she does or says the wrong thing.

Rita agrees, she finds a doctor, they fake the drug lord’s death, his wife, played by Selena Gomez, and kids are tucked away safely in Switzerland with a full support staff, Rita is dismissed from the drug lord’s life without incident, and before we know it, we meet a new character–Emilia Perez.

It should be noted that Karla Sofia Gascon, an openly transgender performer, plays Emilia as well as the drug lord.

Four years later, Rita is rich, successful, and living in London. While at a restaurant attending a dinner party, she strikes up a conversation with a woman who can also speak Spanish. She quickly realizes this isn’t just any woman.

Emilia Perez acknowledges her former life to Rita, and then makes yet another demand of her.

I promise you, at this point, the movie is not even half over. The rest of the movie utterly defied my expectations. Despite feeling as though everything could go wrong for Rita at any given moment, and even though I was on the edge of my seat in fear that Emilia Perez would unleash the monster buried deep within, I found myself captivated by the story and the characters.

This is a story about second chances, violence, repentance, revenge, love, anger, family, loyalty, betrayal, fear, and faith.

Even now, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around Emilia Perez. I just know that it challenged my intellect, it moved me, and it still lingers in my head days after watching it.

In a world of reboots, remakes, and retreads, Emilia Perez is unlike anything else you’ve ever seen.