Kiss of the Spider Woman: A Dazzling Fantasy Trapped in a Timid Cell
Two prisoners share a cell and a fantasy, but only one half of Bill Condon's musical ever fully commits to its own escape.
By MIGUEL MATEO | NOVEMBER 27, 2025
Bill Condon's adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman has moments of real musical brilliance, and they belong almost entirely to its two leads. Tonatiuh, as Luis Molina, gives the film its emotional pulse, playing a queer window dresser jailed alongside Diego Luna's Valentin Arregui Paz with a softness that never curdles into caricature. Jennifer Lopez, cast in triple duty as Ingrid Luna, Aurora, and the title's spectral Spider Woman, supplies the film's spark whenever it needs one, moving between wounded ingenue and glittering menace with the kind of control that reminds you why this material was built as a star vehicle in the first place.
The dream sequences, staged as the golden-age Hollywood musicals Molina narrates to survive his imprisonment, are where Condon's craft is most visible. They are beautifully shot, drenched in the kind of studio-system gloss that makes sense coming from the man who wrote Chicago and directed Dreamgirls. Several of the numbers land as genuinely spectacular set pieces, Lopez commanding them with the confidence of someone who has clearly wanted to do this her whole career.
And yet the film never becomes the pull-out-all-the-stops epic it should have been. Condon has the pedigree and, on the evidence of these sequences, the visual imagination to deliver something as excessive and transporting as the musical fantasy demands. Instead the film settles for handsome competence in its most theatrical moments, never quite pushing past tasteful into overwhelming.
The bigger problem sits on the other side of the film's central hinge. The real-world setting, an Argentine prison during the Dirty War of the early 1980s, needed far more grit and realism to match the weight of the story and its historical context. Condon shoots the cell scenes cleanly, almost gently, when the material calls for something closer to suffocating. Valentin's torture and the state violence surrounding him register as plot information rather than lived horror, and that softness undercuts the stakes Molina is supposedly escaping through fantasy in the first place.
That is the film's real failure: not any single sequence, but the missing juxtaposition between dream and reality. The entire structural conceit of Kiss of the Spider Woman, on stage and on the page before it, depends on the gap between those two registers doing the emotional work. When the prison isn't harrowing enough, the musical numbers stop functioning as escape and start functioning as simply another pretty section of the movie. Condon, of all directors, understands how these contrasts are supposed to operate. That he doesn't fully exploit it here is the film's most frustrating shortfall.
Kiss of the Spider Woman shines in parts. Tonatiuh and Lopez are both giving performances that deserve a more dangerous movie around them, and the musical craft on display is proof Condon can still stage a number with real style. But without the friction between the cell and the fantasy, the film settles for being good in pieces rather than great as a whole.
Rating: ★★1/2 out of ★★★★★