‘Elisa’ Review: An Italian Crime Drama That Asks Lots of Intriguing Questions but Delivers Dull Answers

You have to give Italian director Leonardo Di Constanzo credit for making the story behind his latest film feel so real that it plays more like docudrama than actual fiction.

That’s both the pro and con of Elisa, a tough, solemn study of a killer that tosses off plenty of interesting ideas about crime, guilt, justice and absolution, but doesn’t grip the viewer the way you’d expect from this kind of material. Starring Barbara Ronchi as a woman convicted of murdering her own sister, this Venice competition premiere feels too minor to make much of a splash outside Europe, even if it tackles a delicate subject matter with both intelligence and resolve.  

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Per an opening title card, the film was indeed inspired by a true story, while the press notes cite the non-fiction work of Italian criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali as sources. In the screenplay, written by Di Constanzo along with Bruno Oliviero and Valia Santella, those experts have been transformed (seemingly for financing purposes) into a Frenchman named Alaoui (Roschdy Zem), who gives lectures at a remote women’s facility in the Alps that feels more like a guarded summer camp than a prison.

Alaoui’s specialty is criminal psychology, and he soon meets one of his most fascinating subjects when the titular murderer shows up to be interviewed. Through snippets of backstory, we learn that Elisa (Ronchi) has spent a decade behind bars for killing her sister (Roberta Da Soller) and burning the body. The rest of the movie goes on to explain how, and a bit why, such a seemingly gentle woman could do such an absolutely awful thing.

Di Constanzo made several documentaries in the early part of his career and already tackled Italian incarceration with his last feature, The Inner Cage, which was set in a nearly abandoned prison populated by aging convicts. This time, he focuses on a unique outdoor facility run by a benevolent warden (Hippolyte Girardot) who allows the inmates to wander the surrounding forests, work in a prison café serving espresso and croissants to the guards, and engage in lengthy interviews with the inquisitive Alaoui.

As Elisa starts to tell her story, the narrative flashes back to show her life before the murder, gradually unlocking the mystery for both Alaoui and the viewer — as well as for Elisa herself, who claims to have had amnesia when she did the deed.

The more she delves into her past, which involves a troubled family business and domineering mother (Monica Codena), the more Elisa unravels in the present. Alaoui sees it as a path toward a major breakthrough, allowing the killer to come to terms with her act. But his subject soon begins to shut down, cutting her father (Diego Ribon) out of her life — he’s the only family member who still talks to her — and risking to never fully acknowledge her crime.

This all sounds fairly intriguing on paper; it’s unfortuantely less interesting to observe on screen. Di Constanzo’s movie is so filled with heavy dialogue and explanations that it can feel rather bland, as if we were watching staged re-enactments in a true crime doc. There’s hardly any intense action and the suspense level is altogether low, which seems like a missed opportunity given that Elisa is basically the story of a horrible fratricide.

The problem is that Di Constanzo seems to be intellectualizing his themes rather than dramatizing them. His movie asks lots of serious questions via the character of Alaoui, who believes that “guilt must be sought in the humanity” of the perpetrator and pushes Elisa to “reclaim her story” so she can grasp what she did, perhaps finding a way to live with it in the future. But when the direction doesn’t hook us in enough, these ideas tend to go down like a lukewarm latte in a film that could have really used more heat.

The director does get solid performances out of his French and Italian cast, with the engaging Ronchi (Marco Bellocchio’s Sweet Dreams) playing a softspoken woman who seems to be in some kind of permanent stupor until her confessions bring her back to life. The always watchable Zem (Other People’s Children) is strong as an obsessive intellectual whose theories drive him to push others to the brink, while Valeria Golino (a requisite for any Italian festival film these days) shows up as the aggrieved mother of a victim.

There are times when Di Constanzo’s latest recalls Belgian director Joachim Lafosse’s powerful 2012 drama Our Children, which was centered on a woman who murdered her own young children. Both filmmakers express compassion and understanding when it comes to depicting heinous crimes, focusing on the “humanity” (per Alaoui) of the killers and allowing us to face the unspeakable. Elisa ultimately does this much more by telling than showing, resulting in a movie that has a lot to say but never makes its message memorable.