‘Elisa’ review: Italian prison drama sees a convict with amnesia struggle to recall her crime

Dir: Leonardo Di Costanzo. Italy/Switzerland 2025. 110mins

Ten years into a prison sentence for a violent crime that she has very little memory of having committed, 30-something Elisa (a muted Barbara Ronchi) agrees to a series of interviews with criminologist Alaoui (Roschdy Zem). Gradually, the protective clouds of her amnesia start to part, and the details of the brutal murder of her older sister coalesce. Yet Elisa’s journey is largely internal, and she’s not an entirely reliable witness. The latest drama from Venice regular Leonardo Di Costanzo, Elisa is dialogue-heavy and dramatically inert. Plus, any tension is defused by the fact that Elisa takes to her bed and cuts off all lines of communication at a pivotal point in the story.

Dialogue-heavy and dramatically inert

The film is loosely inspired by an essay by criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali, and it continues Di Costanzo’s fascination with themes of crime, guilt and forgiveness, frequently viewed through the lens of rocky family dynamics. Having first cut his teeth as a documentarian, Di Constanzo made his fiction feature debut in 2012 with The Interval, which picked up Venice’s Best Debut and  FIPRESCI Prize. His 2017 follow up, The Intruder (2017)  launched in Cannes Director’s Fortnight, while his most recent picture, The Inner Cage – which, like Elisa, is set in a prison – premiered in Venice in 2021 and went on to pick up a raft of Italian industry and critics’ gongs. Elisa, a predominantly French-language picture which is set and filmed in Switzerland, may struggle to assert itself far beyond the local markets. 

The facility where Elisa is housed is a ‘correctional rehabilitation’ institution, rather than a conventional jail. Which, in practice, means that the female inmates are permitted to wander more or less at will around the forested Alpine grounds, live in dinky wooden chalets and seem to be provided with complimentary muffins.

Di Constanzo makes the most of the landscape with a wide, generous aspect ratio, bringing a welcome visual contrast to the rather more claustrophobic scenes of Elisa’s conversations with the criminologist. Alaoui’s presence at the facility further hints at its unconventional approach. In addition to one-on-one interviews with inmates, he’s delivering a lecture series to an audience that combines members of the public (Valeria Golino has a fiery cameo as the mother of a murdered son) with inmates from the institution.

Of the inmates, Elisa is one of the notorious. Her crime – she murdered her sister and burned her body – is regularly revisited and raked over by the press. A kindly guard makes a point of telling her that he finds it hard to reconcile the quiet, reserved prisoner that he knows with the monster portrayed by the media. Alaoui’s point, which he stresses in an initial lecture, is that rather than regarding the perpetrators of crimes as inherently evil, it’s crucial to tap into their humanity and start the journey towards redemption. But for Elisa, rejected by all of her family except her father and distanced from her crime by her amnesia, redemption seems a long way off.

The details of her past life and the crime – for someone with amnesia, she talks fluently and fully about both – are illustrated with flashbacks, in which Ronchi struggles to convince as the 21-year-old version of her character. Unfortunately, the main takeaway from these, and the conversations with Alaoui, is that just because someone committed a homicide and attempted another one, it doesn’t make them interesting.