Elisa by Leonardo Di Costanzo
- Planet Claire
- Sep 28
- 3 min read
Elisa (2025)
directed by Leonardo Di Costanzo
screenplay by Leonardo Di Costanzo, Bruno Olivero, Valia Santella
premiered in competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival
running time: 1h45
Barbara Ronchi as Elisa
Roschdy Zem as criminologist and university lecturer Alaoui
Valeria Golino as a mother
After the acclaimed Ariaferma (2021), Leonardo Di Costanzo returns to explore the prison world with Elisa, this time choosing a different approach. Ariaferma was a claustrophobic film: a men’s prison, set in an ancient, isolated building, symbolised constant surveillance and forced relationships. The experimental penitentiary of Moncaldo (an imaginary place) is instead an “open” prison nestled in the Swiss mountains, where female inmates live in chalets, work together, have access to university studies and enjoy wide spaces for respect, solitude and silence: a prison that resembles a secular monastery, able to transform detention into an inner journey.
The film is inspired by the work of criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali and their essay Io volevo ucciderla (“I Wanted to Kill Her”).
At the centre of this setting lies the story of Elisa (Barbara Ronchi), a young woman convicted of a heinous crime: the murder of her elder sister, followed by an attempt to erase the traces by setting fire to the corpse. Having already served ten years of her sentence, she lives with an outward serenity, sustained by an officially diagnosed amnesia which has erased almost all memory of the crime, an event she no longer has an individual experience of.
But the arrival of criminologist Alaoui (Roschdy Zem) unsettles this fragile balance: he is a passionate scholar. Particularly striking is the opening scene of his lecture on public perception of crime and the subjective sense of “justice”, illustrated through a photograph of the lynching of two African Americans in the southern United States in the 1930s.
The sessions with the young woman, marked by painful and intense exchanges, give rise to flashbacks that gradually reconstruct the missing fragments, forcing Elisa to confront a reality that until then had been ghostly, unacknowledged.
Can the perpetrator, through their words, gain access to the personal truth of their act?
The two protagonists create a genuine dialogic space, both intimate and social, where the violent cosmology of the crime’s author gradually takes shape, becoming identifiable, “seen”, and eventually acknowledged. Professor Alaoui is convinced that redemption can only come through full awareness of one’s wrongdoing.
The open, luminous spaces of the Swiss prison become the counterpoint to the protagonist’s closed, wounded mind, as she is compelled to reopen the dark rooms of her soul.
The direction lingers on her face, relying on Barbara Ronchi’s performance, which avoids clichés and portrays a character who is fragile, impenetrable, and yet frighteningly real.
Alongside her, Roschdy Zem provides a measured, reflective, and profound presence.
Valeria Golino, in a secondary role as a mother seeking justice for a son killed senselessly by a gang of youths, introduces the harrowing theme of the victims, reminding that truth cannot be reduced to a legal verdict, and that any process of rehabilitation must reckon with those who have suffered the irreparable pain of loss, and who may never be ready to forgive.
Where Ariaferma refrained from depicting the crimes committed by its inmates, focusing instead on the tension of forced coexistence, Elisa concentrates on the crime itself and the prisoner’s memory, and she is isolated. Ultimately, the film questions the possibility of forgiveness, reconciliation, and rebirth.
Di Costanzo’s work does not offer easy answers: each character remains an irreducible universe. The film dares to enter the shadowy zones of the conscience, to look beyond the walls each of us carries within.
This is cinema that grants the audience time — an austere, beautiful, and profoundly human work. A film that undoubtedly lingers.
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