Memories of Murder: Di Costanzo Treads Criminal Motives
The impetus behind Elisa, the latest from Italian director Leonardo Di Costanzo is pregnant with intrigue, examining the motives behind an incarcerated woman who burned her sister to death a decade prior even as she claims to not remember what happened. Based on a true story, it’s in a similar vein to Di Costanzo’s previous feature, 2021’s The Inner Cage (read review), wherein a group of prison inmates undergo fatigue and stagnation waiting for transport to another facility, a comparable examination of captive minds navigating existential limbo. Unfortunately, with this rather sedate approach consisting of lengthy interview sessions between a researching criminologist and the eponymous woman struggling to take responsibility for actions, rather eludes instead of invites intrigue. Oversimplified as regards the psychology of both subject and researcher, it’s a rather leaden, sleepy character study insistently searching for answers we already know before the opening credits – the truth shall set you free.
Professor Alaoui (Roschdy Zem) is a criminologist working in conjunction with a rehabilitation center as he’s working on a new project. Of the inmates who have volunteered to be interviewed for his publication is Elisa Zanetti (Barbara Ronchi). Having served ten years of her sentence and eligible for parole, her involvement is curious considering experts had validated her claims of amnesia as related to her crimes. Upon meeting the tranquil professor, Elisa slowly begins to let her guard down as she delves into a troubled upbringing. Having inherited her family’s sawmill business at the age of twenty, various pressures caused the company to implode. Since she had a poor relationship with her older sister, her mother’s favorite sibling, she concocted a way to place the blame of the company’s failure elsewhere only to find her devious plan resulted in a tragedy she’d never allowed herself to face. Until now.
As far as characterization, Elisa is a film seemingly disinterested in everyone outside of its titular subject. Barbara Ronchi, who isn’t ever allowed the chance to break from her dour countenance, simply plays a woman who, due to both the time elapsed since her crime and the patient probing of a kindly interviewer, at last finds the will to confront her transgressions. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Ronchi’s performance, but we’re told about her transformation more than we see it. The present day sequences with Roschdy Zem are formidably sterile, and it’s unclear what Elisa’s motivation is beyond the fortuitousness of someone bothering to take an interest. Curiously, the institute designed to care for her mental well-being, as Hippolyte Girardot’s director so clearly states, seems to have foregone continual analysis in favor of what seems like existing in tranquil harmony amongst other inmates in an isolated chalet.
The film receives a much needed burst of action from flashback sequences to Elisa’s life just prior to and shortly after her dirty deeds, if only for the grisliness of her actions. Her harpy of a mother is purely caricature, but a moment of fury whereby Elisa strangles the carping parental figure and then lights her on fire is jarring. And yet, unlike one of the guards, we don’t see the disparity between the murderer and the shell of a woman she’s become—she seems quite plausible, based on her behavior and demeanor, of these capabilities. Of course, a major theme of the film regards how base, violent tendencies are inherent in every human.
Valeria Golino pops up to express the counter argument to Roschdy Zem’s life work, attending his lectures as a mourning mother, only to confront him about her dead-end search for answers as to why her own son was murdered by a group of young men she describes as thugs. “That’s the language of the perpetrators,” she snaps, when it’s suggested her hatred holds her back from moving on. Ultimately, it’s not about the search for answers, but learning to accept the unsatisfying ones that already exist.
Zem has always been a consistently enjoyable screen presence, but Di Costanzo doesn’t give him much to work with, and the idea of his encounters with Elisa Zanetti having irreparably changed him is a transformation we’re, again, told about rather than shown. Curiously, there are striking similarities to Zem’s role in Arnaud Desplechin’s Oh, Mercy! (2019), wherein he investigates a heinous crime perpetrated by Lea Seydoux and Sara Forestier. Ultimately, Elisa features compelling (if familiar) ideas and subject matter about murder and women who kill, but it shuffles along listlessly as an exercise of somnolent resolve.
Reviewed on September 4th at the 2025 Venice Film Festival (82nd edition) – In Competition. 105 Mins.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆
