Selena Gomez has several songs on the Emilia Pérez soundtrack, aka the new Spanish-language musical crime drama that began streaming on Netflix today. But if you’re looking to check out the Selena Gomez song from Emilia Pérez, the pop star’s breakout number is undoubtedly “Bienvenida,” an angry punk rock number that captures her character’s raw, unapologetic rage.
Written and directed by French filmmaker Jacques Audiard, Emilia Pérez tells the story of a Mexican named lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldaña), who agrees to help a notorious drug cartel leader named Manitas (Karla Sofía Gascón) secretly transition to a new life as a woman named Emilia (also Gascón, who is a trans woman). This involves relocating Manitas’s wife, Jessi (Gomez), and their two children to a remote home in Switzerland. Jessi is kept entirely in the dark—she’s told only that her husband is in deep trouble, and that this is the only way to stay safe. She begs Rita not to abandon her in the snowy Alps. But Rita doesn’t work for Jessi. Later, alone in Switzerland with her kids, Jessi hears on the news that her husband is dead. You can imagine her shock, then, when a supposed long-lost cousin of her late husband—Emilia—shows up in her life, moves her back to Mexico, and expects to co-parent her children.
“Bienvenida” is written by French singer Camille Dalmais, who wrote all the original songs for the movie, while Clément Ducol provided the score. Like most of the Emilia Pérez songs, it is more of an emotional outburst than it is a fully realized musical number. It starts off as a husky, grumbling, early-morning rant from Gomez, after Jessi has been roused from her new bed in her new home. It’s the second time her life has been completely upended without her choice, or even input. She is, understandably, more than a little pissed off.
Wearing only an oversized tee shirt and a pair of black underwear, Gomez rolls around on her bed with concise, controlled movements. She half sings, and half yells, about the “gilded prison” where her dear cousin Emilia has trapped her. Perhaps in a nod to Gomez’s massive social media following, choreographer Damien Jalet includes a sequence where Gomez’s films herself on her iPhone, as if she were livestreaming to Selanator nation.
At the song’s climax, Gomez runs out of her bedroom and onto a sound stage, where she joins a team of dancers in performing jerky, thrashing movements—almost as if they are being possessed by some sort of punk rock demon. They convulse and spasm to a beat that picks up speed, until it finally culminates in an animalistic shriek from Gomez.
It’s certainly a lot more raw, disjointed, and punk rock than fans are used to seeing from Gomez, a pop singer who came up from the Disney Channel scene in the 2010s, and has since successfully pivoted to a more serious, adult acting career—including an Emmy-nominated lead role in Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building. According to an interview with Gomez for the Emilia Pérez production notes, the fact that Jessi felt like a new kind of role was what attracted Gomez to the project.
“I usually get offered the role of girl next door or coming-of-age stories, and this film felt like a way to disrupt that and show my range as an actor,” Gomez said. Though she has released a Spanish language album, Spanish is not Gomez’s first language, and her character reflected that. “My character is Mexican American, with family back in the United States,” Gomez explained in that same interview. “She doesn’t speak perfect Spanish, and that reflects the experience of so many Latinx people in this country and of my generation.”
Gomez gets another big number later in the movie, an inspiring ballad that she sings, karaoke style, with Édgar Ramirez, called “Mi Camino.” But “Bienvenida” is her standout moment. Personally, I’d “welcome” an encore performance from Gomez at the 2025 Oscars.