Summary
Elize: Shadows of a Woman is carried by a solid lead performance and a handful of effective scenes, but its familiarity, especially with Netflix having already told the true story in docuseries form, is a significant obstacle it never quite overcomes.
Elize: Shadows of a Woman has a problem that it never quite manages to overcome – we’ve seen it all before. By this, I don’t mean that we’ve seen dramatized true-crime stories like it before; I mean we have literally seen this exact story play out, also on Netflix, in the form of the four-part docuseries Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime. This isn’t to say that an effective movie can’t be made about the subject, and this is in many ways an effective film, but it lacks real insight and intrigue because the details were much better expounded upon in the documentary.
To be fair, a lot of the people watching Shadows of a Woman might not have seen Once Upon a Crime, which is fair enough. But the feeling lingers in the background all the same. There’s no mystery about what happened here; in May 2012, Elize Matsunaga shot her husband, Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, in the head, chopped his body into pieces, stuffed the parts into suitcases, and then dumped the remains. The movie opens with the murder, or at least in its aftermath, so none of this constitutes a spoiler.
The dramatic question is mostly one of “why”. Was Elize frightened for her life and her daughter, or was she a money-grabbing lunatic? The answer seems to be a little from column A, and a little from column B, though it seemed to me that this feature from Felipe Vellas (Criminal Code) is making a few implications about some latent psychopathy. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something about a person being too eager while hunting and unironically liking snakes that raises a few red flags. As soon as handguns started turning up in the bedroom, I thought I had the measure of Elize, but it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The complexity is explored through a four-chapter structure that mimics the four episodes of the docuseries. The story doesn’t run entirely chronologically, and instead ping-pongs around to take in Elize’s upbringing, family dynamics, sex work, the early days of her relationship with Marcos, whom she met while he was still married, their deeply passionless efforts to conceive a child, and so on, and so forth. There’s nothing especially illuminating in any of these passages, but some sequences are fairly dramatically staged, which is an upside.
But the biggest upside is Lorena Comparato as Elize. Characteristic of an international Netflix effort, the dub is woeful, but Comparato is really rather good. And she has a fair amount to play here. She sells being a seductress, being a housewife, and being a psycho in just about equal measure, and every facet is fairly important, since the bundled-up class dynamics and the uncertainty of her motive are pretty central to the allure of the case, which captured headlines in Brazil when it took place.
At just 90 minutes, Elize: Shadows of a Woman is very slight, and thanks to the chaptered structure, each phase can’t help but feel slightly underdeveloped. It’s crying out for the depth of the docuseries, but at the same time, the docuseries strips a lot of potential intrigue from the feature, so the two projects detract from one another instead of forming a complementary pair. Comparato’s performance – and only hers; Henrique Kimura is believably slimy as Marcos, but he’s largely a caricature – might be reason enough alone to check this out, but if you’re already familiar with the story, which most of Netflix’s true-crime aficionados will be, then the movie doesn’t really offer a compelling alternative perspective.
