Ema (2019)
There's a moment early in Ema where the camera just sits with its subject as she moves through a neon-lit Santiago street, reggaeton thumping beneath her, and you realise you're not going to be given any easy way into this woman. She's magnetic and she's awful, and Pablo Larraín is absolutely not going to apologise for either of those things. That refusal to comfort the audience is, depending on your patience, either the film's greatest virtue or its most maddening quality. For me, it's both at once, and I'm still sitting with that three days later.
The setup is raw: Ema and her older husband, a choreographer who co-leads their dance troupe, have returned an adopted son whose behaviour, including setting fires, has fractured their household beyond what they can hold together. That act, giving a child back, sits at the moral centre of the film like a wound that nobody will properly clean. Larraín doesn't use it as a jumping-off point for easy judgment. He uses it as a pressure cooker, and then he turns the heat all the way up.
Gael García Bernal is quietly extraordinary here. It would be easy to play the controlling, wounded husband as a villain, but there's too much grief in him for that. He carries the emotional weight of the marriage's collapse with real restraint, which makes the scenes between him and Mariana Di Girolamo crackle with something genuinely uncomfortable. Di Girolamo, for her part, commits completely to a character who is selfish, childish, volatile and mean. Larraín gives her no softening edit, no redemptive grace note, no wink to the audience that says "but underneath it all..." There's no underneath it all. What you see is what you get, and what you get is a lot to handle.
The film wraps all of this in a sensory package that would feel excessive in less assured hands. The cinematography turns Santiago's streets and rehearsal studios into something approaching a fever dream, all saturated colour and deep shadow. The synth-heavy score pulses through every sequence like a second heartbeat. This isn't style for style's sake, though. The visual and sonic language mirrors the chaotic, seductive logic of Ema's world. It's psychological. You feel what she feels, even when you're appalled by her.
Larraín is one of the most interesting filmmakers working today. I found El Conde (2023) to be another fascinatingly strange and politically acidic piece of work from him, and it's worth watching the two back to back if you want to understand how he thinks. They share an obsession with power, rot and the terrible things people do to survive or to dominate. The register is completely different, but the fingerprints are the same.
I won't pretend Ema is an easy watch. It's deeply pessimistic, often suffocating, and deliberately structured to withhold the catharsis most viewers go to the cinema hoping for. There is no redemption arc. There is no moment where everything clicks into warmth. The narrative's endgame is genuinely surprising, but it's not satisfying in any conventional sense, which I think is entirely the point. Larraín isn't interested in making you feel better. He's interested in making you feel.
The comparison that kept surfacing for me was films like Lukas Moodysson's Lilya 4-Ever, portraits of young women at the mercy of their own choices and everyone else's, where love and damage become genuinely hard to separate. Ema is less bleak in its circumstances but perhaps more troubling in its moral ambiguity, because nobody here is a clear victim and nobody is entirely innocent.
Three and a half stars. Bold, technically brilliant and genuinely unforgettable. Not for everyone, and I mean that sincerely rather than as a cop-out. But if you're willing to sit inside its heat without flinching, it earns your discomfort.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2019 | Watched: 2026-05-30
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: MUBI · MUBI Amazon Channel · Channel 4 Plus
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Pijama Films
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
Stream: Netflix · Amazon Prime Video · Philo · Brew
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US
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