‘Kiss Of The Spider-Woman’: Sundance Review

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

From book to stage to film to stage musical and on to film musical: some IPs just end up devouring themselves. Kiss Of The Spiderwoman has been so lauded – the 1985 film won a Bafta and Oscar for William Hurt; the 1993 stage musical took six Tonys – that it’s a shame to see it fall off its stilettos in Bill Condon’s film adaptation of the Broadway show. 

The songs struggle to assert themselves

The cast is sincere and committed, from newcomer Tonatiuh in the Hurt role, to Diego Luna (for Raul Julia) and Jennifer Lopez (in a version of the part once played by Sonia Braga, and, on stage, by Chita Rivera). It’s disappointing that what they are peddling has become so distorted. Spangly song-and-dance numbers punctuate — irregularly – grisly prison scenes and a tortured gay love story which now must accommodate more modern gender thinking. The effort is strenuous; all 128 minutes of it. But it’s almost as exhausting to watch as it must have been to make.

There’s a lot of curiosity surrounding this Spider-Woman, produced by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck’s Artists Equity with exteriors shot in Uruguay. That may dampen down following its Sundance world premiere, although Lopez will trail publicity wherever she goes, particularly as ex-husband Affleck is involved. This will play best to a musical theatre fans who will appreciate Condon’s staging (the fact he wrote Chicago is clear to see), and LGBTQ+ audiences for the prison romance – of course there’s a strong crossover between the two. Lopez, whose role is almost separated from the rest of the film, delivers good old-fashioned, vaseline-lensed Hollywood musical razzle-dazzle – although she can’t sell her part into making much sense.

Who is the Spider-Woman? Originally, it was Molina (played here by Tonatiuh), a window-dresser imprisoned for corrupting a minor and put in an Argentine prison during the military dictatorship with a macho revolutionary cell-mate Valentin (Luna). To pass the time, Molina tells Valentin stories of six movies, focusing on the female leads. In 1985, Hector Babenco moved the locale to Brazil, and focused largely on the plot of a Nazi propaganda romance. For the stage musical, and its film adaptation, Molina is in jail in Argentina again, for public indecency. Now he dreams of only one film, The Kiss Of The Spider-Woman, starring his idol Ingrid Lua (Jennifer Lopez). 

Here, as Molina recounts the plot from their bare-bones cell, the film cuts to full technicolour and a host of elaborately-staged dance sequences. He also appears in them, with Valentin in this fantasy too, as Luna’s suitor. This film-within-a-film is visually dynamic, but plot-wise, it’s a snooze. There’s a lot of tango, and Lopez’s costumes could be described as full-throttle camp. Back in the cell, though, as Molina and Valentin start to build a rapport, it’s anything but. It’s hard to imagine Valentin’s underpants could get any grubbier, and that’s before he fills them after a bout of food poisoning. Condon’s camera is very interested in the result. This may be an adaptation of a Broadway musical, but it’s more wicked than Wicked.

It’s a little bitchy too, for a film about noble human hearts and love amongst the oppressed. Molina leans back on his bed and longs for the days of Hollywood glamour, decrying ‘ugly’ actors like Glenn Close, Sissy Spacek and Glenda Jackson (this is May, 1983). Which seems a little un-necessary, in a film which isn’t really fit to polish their boots, if we’re all going to be honest. It’s supposed to convey how star-struck Molina is, how he prefers to live in his world of fantasy, but that point was better made when the character couldn’t distinguish good from evil in the Nazi film-within-a-film from 1985.

Tonatiuh and Luna act their hearts out here. Tonatiuh is a revelation: the role is much more theatrical here than when Hurt played it, and the casting is apt. Diego Luna too, puts his soul into the film. It’s a little strange 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 features, he almost looks haggard, although the life of a dedicated South American Marxist in Buenos Aires the early 80s was no doubt ageing.

Kiss Of The Spider-Woman - the film-within-a-film, that is - was shot on soundstages, with no cost to credibility due to the theatricality of it all. The prison sequences filmed in Uruguay. Condon adapted it himself, and is working from the musical, and not any other iterations of the IP first generated in novel form by Manuel Puig in 1976.  The Broadway book is by Terrence McNally with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and it won Tonys for them all. Here, the songs struggle to assert themselves, which is no surprise, as the bridge between State-sponsored murder and torture and faeces-filled underwear and full-on Broadway razzle-dazzle is far too wide for this Spider-Woman to land her web.