The moment Cynthia Erivo began to sing, something changed in the theater. Not just sound — vibration. Something that traveled through the back of the seat and rose from somewhere deep in the chest. The person beside me was already crying before she had finished the first phrase of the opening number. I understood why immediately, even though I hadn’t expected to.
Wicked: For Good is the second part of Jon M. Chu’s adaptation of the stage musical, concluding the story that Part One set in motion. Elphaba is on the run. Glinda has made her choice. The world has decided who the villain is. What the film is interested in — the only thing it is really interested in — is whether that story is true.
The Pop Score
Rating based on impact and craft.
What Cynthia Erivo Does That Cannot Be Taught
Elphaba is one of the most technically demanding roles in contemporary musical theater. The vocal range required, the emotional complexity demanded, the sheer physical endurance of carrying a two-part film on your back — any one of these would be sufficient to define a performance. Erivo delivers on all three simultaneously, and then goes somewhere beyond them.
What she has that most performers at this level don’t is the ability to make silence work. Between phrases, in the pauses, in the moments when the character has heard something that has not yet finished registering — Erivo is present in a way that most performers, even exceptional ones, are not. She does not rest in her rests. She inhabits them. The camera finds her face in these moments, and what it finds is a woman in the process of deciding something — about herself, about the world, about what she is willing to sacrifice to remain who she is.
The climactic sequence — which I will not describe in detail — works not because it is staged beautifully, though it is, but because Erivo has built toward it across four hours of screen time. When it arrives, it feels inevitable in the way that only great dramatic writing and great dramatic performance together can achieve.
Ariana Grande’s Transformation
Part One established Glinda as a character study in the performance of perfection. Part Two completes that study. Grande’s Glinda in this film is doing something more difficult than what she was asked to do in the first: she is playing someone who has won, and who is beginning to understand what winning has cost her.
The specific achievement is a scene in the film’s second act — quiet, almost static, a single conversation — in which Glinda confronts the gap between what she believes and what she has actually seen. Grande plays this with a stillness that she had not previously shown she possessed. It is the best dramatic work of her film career, and it earns its placement in a film full of extraordinary performances.
On the Film’s Central Argument
Wicked has always been a story about who gets to define villainy, and about the relationship between narrative and power. Part Two sharpens this argument to a point. By the final act, the film has made it genuinely difficult to locate the moral center — not because it is being relativistic, but because it takes seriously the idea that good people make choices that look bad from the outside, and that systems built to enforce goodness can produce catastrophic harm.
The film does not tell you what to think about this. It shows you the choices, shows you their consequences, and trusts you to sit with the complexity. In a cultural moment defined by the demand for clarity, this trust feels both necessary and courageous.
On Sitting With the Film After
I didn’t move for several minutes after the credits began. Not from being overwhelmed — I was, but that’s not why I didn’t move. I didn’t move because I wasn’t finished with it yet. The film had given me something that required processing, and the lobby was not the right place for that processing to happen.
That is the experience Wicked: For Good is designed to create. It largely succeeds.
Wicked: For Good (2025). Director: Jon M. Chu. Starring: Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande. This review reflects the personal opinion of the author.
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