This year’s Academy Award winner for best foreign-language film is virtually a horror film. What Marina (Daniela Vega) experiences upon the death of her lover, Orlando (Francisco Reyes), dramatizes with terrifying reality how daily life, as well as significant milestones, become unexpected struggles for transgender men and women. 

After taking Orlando to the hospital during a fatal medical emergency, Marina is subject to police interrogation and a trifecta of mental, emotional and physical abuse at the words and hands of those recognized as Orlando’s survivors by the law. Marina cannot even get the law to recognize her name. The undue suspicion and mistrust generated solely by society’s overall lack of understanding about her and others like her provides an eye-opening look at modern gender identity. 

Vega, a Chilean actress and singer in only her second featured role, is a stunning revelation, and she now joins Laverne Cox as another representative of trans women in a world where the hostility faced by Marina is not only allowed but justifiable. Films like A Fantastic Woman—and its inevitable, inferior Hollywood remake, probably starring Richard Gere as Orlando, capable of reaching an exponentially larger audience—are crucial to changing the world into one that welcomes everyone, no matter who they love or how they self-identify.