Ema' Movie Review

The first time you see Ema, she's standing in front of a burning traffic light. Bleached hair slicked back tight against her skull, eyes blank, a flamethrower slung over her shoulder like a guitar. The whole movie is right there in the first ninety seconds. Gorgeous. Deranged. Vaguely terrifying. And not at all interested in explaining itself.

If you've only known Pablo Larraín through his English-language work (Jackie, Spencer, the recent Maria), this is a very different beast. Ema is his return to Chile after the Natalie Portman one-two of Jackie and Neruda, and it's also his first film set in present-day Chile. You can feel him shaking off the Oscar-reverence the moment the reggaeton kicks in.

Why You Should Watch It

Look, Ema is the kind of film that gets called "polarising" in reviews because nobody wants to commit. So let me commit. It's a stunt. It knows it's a stunt. And it absolutely earns being one.

Set in the port city of Valparaíso, the film follows Ema (Mariana Di Girólamo), a reggaeton dancer in an experimental troupe led by her older choreographer husband Gastón (Gael García Bernal). Their marriage is collapsing after they returned their adopted son to the orphanage in the wake of a violent incident. Out of that wreckage Ema starts… doing something. Setting a strange, methodical plan in motion. Seducing strangers. Burning things. Dancing on the street with sweat running down her face.

The film is structured like a remix. Cinematographer Sergio Armstrong turns the port city into one long neon mural, all pinks and electric blues. Editor Sebastián Sepúlveda cuts between scenes so that the same conversation feels as if it's happening in two locations at once. And underneath all of it, a Nicolas Jaar score that throbs through every frame. It's genuinely one of the great recent film scores. Jaar started composing before filming wrapped, and Larraín played the unfinished music on set as they shot. You can feel that.

The Lead Is A Genuine Discovery

Mariana Di Girólamo is doing something in this film that leads with twice her experience can't pull off. Ema was her first feature. She came up through Chilean soap operas, mostly the long-running Perdona Nuestros Pecados, and Larraín reportedly cast her after seeing a photograph of her in a newspaper. No audition. One in-person meeting. He just knew.

The strange thing is that Ema as a character is almost impossible to like. Manipulative. Opaque. Sometimes openly cruel. Di Girólamo refuses to soften her. Watch her eyes when she's listening to other people speak. She gives away nothing. All that withheld interiority gets routed into how she dances, which is its own kind of confession. She trained for two months with choreographer José Luis Vidal before the shoot, plus ballet and pilates to change her posture, and you can see it in how she negotiates with the floor.

Bernal, Played Smaller Than You've Seen Him

This is Gael García Bernal's third collaboration with Larraín after No and Neruda, and his Gastón is one of the most uncomfortable performances of his career. He's the diminished one here, smaller than everyone in the room, picking fights he won't win. There's a now-famous monologue where he rants about reggaeton being a vulgar, machista form of music while his wife stares him into the carpet. It is funny, and pathetic, and clearly half the point of the movie.

What Was Going On Behind The Camera Is Wild

Larraín didn't give his actors a full script. They received their scenes the day of shooting, sometimes pages of dialogue written that morning. No rehearsals either. He has called it "working with the unexpected" rather than improv, but in practice it meant Gael García Bernal showing up to film opposite a near-stranger making her first feature, neither of them sure where the scene would land.

That choice is responsible for the strangest texture in the film. People seem to be figuring out what they think while saying it. Conversations land at odd angles. Confrontations stop short of catharsis. Some critics found that maddening. I think it's what makes the film feel alive in a way most prestige films don't.

There's also a bit of accidental timing that gives the film an extra charge. Ema opened in Chile in late September 2019, almost exactly when the country exploded into the largest social uprising it had seen in decades. Suddenly a movie about a young woman torching traffic lights and refusing to behave was playing in a country whose own streets were on fire. Di Girólamo herself has said in interviews that Ema would have been at the front of those protests, goggles on, blowtorch in hand.

Where It Doesn't Quite Land

I'm not going to pretend the film is fully cooked. The plot, when it finally reveals itself, is almost too neat for everything that came before. The "what Ema was actually planning the whole time" answer arrives, and you can feel the air going slightly out of the room. A movie this committed to chaos shouldn't tie itself together quite so cleanly at the end. Some viewers will also bounce off the middle, where the film leans hard into sex and dance montages that can feel like stalling.

It's a 4-out-of-5 movie that thinks it's a 5-out-of-5 movie, and that gap is part of why it's so divisive on Letterboxd.

Things To Watch For

Watch how Larraín shoots Ema's hair. The bleached, slicked-back blonde is an image he and Di Girólamo built deliberately. He told her early on that he wanted her to cut her hair short and dye it, and the camera treats the result like a mask she's choosing to wear.

Watch the reggaeton dance sequences shot in the actual streets of Valparaíso. José Vidal's choreography is built for the camera to move with the dancers, like another body in the troupe.

And watch Bernal's eyes during the social worker scene. He spends most of the film losing arguments. That one, somehow, he has already lost before he opens his mouth.

Ema will infuriate some viewers. It will live in others' heads for years. Both reactions are correct.