‘Kiss Of The Spider-Woman’: Sundance Review

Dir. Invoice Condon. US, 2025. 128 minutes.

From ebook to stage to movie to stage musical and on to movie musical: some IPs simply find yourself devouring themselves. Kiss Of The Spiderwoman has been so lauded – the 1985 movie gained a Bafta and Oscar for William Harm; the 1993 stage musical took six Tonys – that it’s a disgrace to see it fall off its stilettos in Invoice Condon’s movie adaptation of the Broadway present. 

The songs battle to say themselves

The solid is honest and dedicated, from newcomer Tonatiuh within the Harm position, to Diego Luna (for Raul Julia) and Jennifer Lopez (in a model of the half as soon as performed by Sonia Braga, and, on stage, by Chita Rivera). It’s disappointing that what they’re peddling has turn out to be so distorted. Spangly song-and-dance numbers punctuate — irregularly – grisly jail scenes and a tortured homosexual love story which now should accommodate extra fashionable gender pondering. The hassle is strenuous; all 128 minutes of it. However it’s virtually as exhausting to look at because it will need to have been to make.

There’s loads of curiosity surrounding this Spider-Lady, produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Fairness with exteriors shot in Uruguay. That will dampen down following its Sundance world premiere, though Lopez will path publicity wherever she goes, notably as ex-husband Affleck is concerned. This can play finest to a musical theatre followers who will recognize Condon’s staging (the very fact he wrote Chicago is obvious to see), and LGBTQ+ audiences for the jail romance – in fact there’s a powerful crossover between the 2. Lopez, whose position is nearly separated from the remainder of the movie, delivers good old school, vaseline-lensed Hollywood musical razzle-dazzle – though she will be able to’t promote her half into making a lot sense.

Who’s the Spider-Lady? Initially, it was Molina (performed right here by Tonatiuh), a window-dresser imprisoned for corrupting a minor and put in an Argentine jail throughout the navy dictatorship with a macho revolutionary cell-mate Valentin (Luna). To move the time, Molina tells Valentin tales of six motion pictures, specializing in the feminine leads. In 1985, Hector Babenco moved the locale to Brazil, and centered largely on the plot of a Nazi propaganda romance. For the stage musical, and its movie adaptation, Molina is in jail in Argentina once more, for public indecency. Now he goals of just one movie, The Kiss Of The Spider-Lady, starring his idol Ingrid Lua (Jennifer Lopez). 

Right here, as Molina recounts the plot from their bare-bones cell, the movie cuts to full technicolour and a bunch of elaborately-staged dance sequences. He additionally seems in them, with Valentin on this fantasy too, as Luna’s suitor. This film-within-a-film is visually dynamic, however plot-wise, it’s a sleep. There’s loads of tango, and Lopez’s costumes may very well be described as full-throttle camp. Again within the cell, although, as Molina and Valentin begin to construct a rapport, it’s something however. It’s onerous to think about Valentin’s underpants may get any grubbier, and that’s earlier than he fills them after a bout of meals poisoning. Condon’s digital camera may be very within the consequence. This can be an adaptation of a Broadway musical, however it’s extra depraved than Depraved.

It’s a bit of bitchy too, for a movie about noble human hearts and love amongst the oppressed. Molina leans again on his mattress and longs for the times of Hollywood glamour, decrying ‘ugly’ actors like Glenn Shut, Sissy Spacek and Glenda Jackson (that is Could, 1983). Which appears a bit of un-necessary, in a movie which isn’t actually match to shine their boots, if we’re all going to be trustworthy. It’s purported to convey how star-struck Molina is, how he prefers to stay in his world of fantasy, however that time was higher made when the character couldn’t distinguish good from evil within the Nazi film-within-a-film from 1985.

Tonatiuh and Luna act their hearts out right here. Tonatiuh is a revelation: the position is way more theatrical right here than when Harm performed it, and the casting is apt. Diego Luna too, places his soul into the movie. It’s a bit of unusual when the Mexican-born actor, in his mid-forties, is captured cheek-to-cheek with Lopez, a decade older than her co-star. Beside her smoothed options, he virtually appears haggard, though the lifetime of a devoted South American Marxist in Buenos Aires the early 80s was little question ageing.

Kiss Of The Spider-Lady – the film-within-a-film, that’s – was shot on soundstages, with no price to credibility as a result of theatricality of all of it. The jail sequences filmed in Uruguay. Condon tailored it himself, and is working from the musical, and never some other iterations of the IP first generated in novel kind by Manuel Puig in 1976.  The Broadway ebook is by Terrence McNally with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and it gained Tonys for all of them. Right here, the songs battle to say themselves, which isn’t any shock, because the bridge between State-sponsored homicide and torture and faeces-filled underwear and full-on Broadway razzle-dazzle is much too huge for this Spider-Lady to land her internet.