General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985 film)

Kiss of the Spider Woman (O Beijo da Mulher Aranha) is a 1985 drama film directed by Héctor Babenco, adapted by Leonard Schrader from Manuel Puig's 1976 novel, in which two very different prisoners share a cell under a Latin American military dictatorship and gradually form an unexpected bond.¹^•² It stars William Hurt as Molina, a queer window dresser who escapes into retellings of old movies, and Raul Julia as Valentin, a political prisoner tortured for his beliefs, with Sonia Braga playing the women of Molina's fantasies.³ The film competed at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival, where Hurt won the Award for Best Actor, and it brought Hurt the Academy Award for Best Actor.¹^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Héctor Babenco; produced by David Weisman¹
Source	Adaptation of Manuel Puig's 1976 novel; screenplay by Leonard Schrader⁴^•¹
Lead cast	William Hurt (Molina), Raul Julia (Valentin), Sonia Braga (Leni/Marta/Spider Woman)³
Production	Brazil and United States, 1985; about 120–121 minutes⁵
Cannes 1985	In Competition; Award for Best Actor to William Hurt¹
Academy Awards	Hurt won Best Actor; the film was also nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Adapted Screenplay⁴
Critical standing	88% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 40 reviews⁶

Spoilers

Story and structure

The film opens in a cramped prison cell somewhere in South America, where a man is telling a story: a lurid intrigue pieced together from the film noir melodramas of the 1940s. Only gradually does the reality reveal itself, that the storyteller is a prisoner escaping into fantasy to pass the days.³ Molina, jailed for sex offenses, fills the nights by spinning romantic fantasies drawn from memories of old movies, while his cellmate Valentin, a journalist tortured for his political beliefs, has contempt at first for the stories, the sexuality, and the politics.³^•¹

The movie depicts Molina's tales as fantasy scenes. There is a Nazi crime melodrama, in which Braga plays a chanteuse-collaborator scheming against the Resistance, and a thriller about a spider woman; Braga plays the woman in both, and later appears as Valentin's lover, so that reality and fantasy become thoroughly mixed.³^•⁷ As the Cannes synopsis puts it, the prisoners' animosity gradually turns to respect, and they become entangled in an ever-tightening web of betrayal and self-sacrifice.¹

Roger Ebert, the longtime critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, reviewed the film in August 1985 and described it as one of those rare stories where one thing seems to happen while another is really happening; by the end, he wrote, what began as a contest between two opposite personalities expands into a choice between two attitudes toward life, between freedom and slavery.³

Performances and reception

Ebert called the performances wonderful. He wrote that Hurt, playing a frankly theatrical, exaggerated and mannered character unlike anyone else he had played, never seemed to be reaching for effects, and that Julia, sweaty and physical in the early scenes, gradually reveals a poetry that makes the whole movie work; Braga, called upon to satirize bad acting, makes a perfect spider woman.³ The film's Rotten Tomatoes critics consensus describes it as an alluring exploration of sexual and societal norms elevated by the work of Hurt and Julia.⁶ Not all critics agreed on Hurt's approach: the Chicago Reader's Dave Kehr argued the theme of acceptance was undercut by an overcalculated performance, while the Chicago Tribune called it one of the most intriguing prison dramas ever put on film.⁸

Awards

At the 1985 Cannes Film Festival the film was in the official Competition for feature films and won the Award for Best Actor for William Hurt.¹ In the Academy Awards cycle it earned Babenco a nomination for Best Director and brought Hurt the Best Actor award, his first Oscar, with additional nominations for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay.²^•⁴

Production and legacy

Babenco, a Brazilian director whose previous film Pixote (1980) had been his international breakthrough, directed his American stars in English.³^•⁹ The film was a Brazilian and American co-production, produced by HB Filmes and Sugarloaf Films and distributed in the United States by Island Alive; in the United Kingdom, Palace Pictures released it after classification on 21 October 1985.¹⁰^•¹¹

The story has had later lives: a Broadway musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, for which Brent Carver won a Tony playing Molina, and a 2025 film adaptation of the musical directed by Bill Condon.¹² The Criterion Collection issued the 1985 film on 4K UHD and Blu-ray with a new restoration and the 2008 feature-length documentary Tangled Web: Making "Kiss of the Spider Woman", describing it as a work of radical compassion that expands notions of love, gender, and revolution.⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026