Elisa

It is difficult to decipher a crime, or to reduce a criminal act to a clear logic. The story unfolds as if the offense were a self-perpetuating enigma, a stain that cannot be translated into causes and consequences. It is precisely here that criminology finds its most fertile ground: not so much in reconstructing the facts, but in locating the dark point where evil takes shape, in that indecipherable moment when innocence breaks and guilt begins its course.

Lies thus become a central mechanism, not an incidental detail. They function as a parallel language, a code that simultaneously conceals and protects. Criminology knows this: behind every lie lies the promise of a remedy, an attempt to rebalance the irreparable, even when the fracture is a murder. Elisa moves within this paradox, like someone who accepts inhabiting a trap she did not build but ultimately comes to guard. In this sense, her condition recalls a form of subjection that arises not from external constraint, but from the inner need to find meaning, even where meaning seems impossible to decipher.

This dimension also emerges in the analysis of her family context, which is not merely a backdrop but becomes part of the crime itself. A mother who has never wanted her, repeating it insistently until rejection becomes an existential sentence; a father who, by contrast, continues to believe in her, defend her, and visit twice a week as a silent witness to unwavering trust. This fracture does not erase guilt but amplifies it, rendering it more ambiguous, forcing the question of whether evil stems from the criminal act itself or from the environment that prepares, tolerates, and perpetuates it.

The film moves between the terrain of thriller and ethical reflection, guided by the constant gaze of that science which asks not only “who did what,” but especially “where does evil hide, and why does it continue to elude any deciphering?” Costanzo constructs a world in which the characters roam as both perpetrators and victims, trapped in a web of obligations and deceptions that annihilates them. The audience does not witness a straightforward reconstruction of a crime, but a gradual unraveling of available truths, to the point where justice itself appears as an artifice, another necessary lie.

Elisa is thus a film situated in the darkest space—not that of procedural certainty, but that of the undecidable, the irreducible, which cannot be explained but only inhabited. For it is there, in acknowledgment, awareness, interpretation, and the definition of boundaries—whether causes and motives are presumed or real—that one enters a cage not through coercion, but through the need to believe it is the only inhabitable place.