It's not that Netflix cannot make a movie about the Elize Matsunaga case, even after releasing a documentary featuring her interviews back in 2021. The problem arises when the streaming platform greenlights a film that indulges in cheap sensationalism without adding anything interesting to the case that inspired it. Felipe Vellas's Elize: Shadows of a Woman (or Elize: Sombras de uma Mulher) doesn't aim to explore the central figure's personal or psychological dimensions. Rather, it comes prepackaged with all the necessary ingredients, which Vellas merely arranges superficially to create the illusion of both cinematic and subjective depth (Elize, in voiceovers, says that there are details she would only reveal to her daughter in the future). Vellas ostensibly splits his story into different chapters, as if attempting to arrive at an emotional truth step by step, but this structure does little more than resemble the four-episode structure of the Netflix doc. It doesn't help that this storytelling device is neither absorbing nor suspenseful.
Elize: Shadows of a Woman is the kind of crime thriller crafted by someone who is well acquainted with the details of the case, which is why they try to wink at specific details in the early parts of the film for, ahem, "foreshadowing." Hence, the scene where Elize (Lorena Comparato) hunts and skins an animal with a knife, and the one where she playfully, seductively points a gun at her husband, Marcos (Henrique Kimura), during their wedding night. Writers Raphael Montes and Mariana Torres take the principle of Chekhov's Gun so literally and deploy it so obediently that they seem to be practicing the lesson they learned during their Screenwriting 101 class. It's hard to take anything you see seriously. All you notice is the filmmaker's efforts. Elize: Shadows of a Woman opens with Elize's wedding video, where she and Marcos smile and have fun. The camera then moves away from the TV to show Elize dragging her husband's corpse. This is Vellas's way of showing contrast and setting up the drama. When we return to this moment later, the wedding video achieves a new significance: Elize watches it to mourn the life she had and has now lost.
While you can grasp what the filmmakers have attempted, you don't really respond to their work in the way that they want. That's because the movie has no tone, and it just jumps from one scene to the next. Elize was sexually abused by her stepfather, while her biological father cheated on her mother. Marcos, too, has daddy issues, given that his father views him as incompetent. Vellas, though, never develops these points into something dramatically charged or psychologically meaningful. He merely touches on them and then quickly dismisses them. They are akin to "clues" that viewers can compile and discuss afterwards with their friends to give meaning to pieces that have none. It's like making a slipshod mess only to ask the audience to clean it up with their "detective eyes" and "interpretations." Vellas, in the end, is neither interested in the crime nor in the criminal. If he had been, he would have found a link between Elize and a society marked by income inequality and class differences—factors that must have affected Elize's decision to turn towards the life of a high-end escort despite studying nursing and holding a law degree. The filmmakers, however, reduce Elize's education to inconsequential exposition and her profession to an instrument for explaining how she and Marcos met.
What is Elize: Shadows of a Woman, then? An inept feature? Sure. But it's also something else altogether. It's a sort of diary for Elize's daughter, who can watch the movie and understand what drove her mother to murder. Elize does say that one day, her daughter will fully grasp her actions, and that when they meet, she will tell her things meant solely for her daughter's ears. The movie, then, functions like a confessional record for the child and a device that would intrigue her to connect with her parent. Given this heavy dose of maternal pleading, disclosure, and affection, the alternate title of this crime drama could have been Diary of a Mother.
Final Score - [2/10]
Reviewed by - Vikas Yadav
Follow @vikasonorous on Twitter
Publisher at Midgard Times