Lorena Comparato carries Elize Shadows of a Woman, a 90-minute Netflix retelling of the Elize Matsunaga case. The film arrives after Netflix already covered the same material in Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime. That overlap is the point: the feature has to justify itself fast, and it mostly does through pacing and Comparato’s work.
90 Minutes, Four Chapters
The film runs for just 90 minutes, but it still moves through Elize Matsunaga’s upbringing, family dynamics, sex work, the early days of her relationship with Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, and their attempts to conceive a child. Its four-chapter structure mirrors the four episodes of the earlier docuseries, which gives the feature a familiar shape before it has much room to distinguish itself.
In May 2012, Elize Matsunaga shot Marcos Kitano Matsunaga in the head and then chopped his body into pieces, stuffed the parts into suitcases, and dumped the remains. Elize Shadows of a Woman opens with that aftermath, so the film does not waste time pretending the case needs a procedural build-up. It goes straight to the material that already made the story headline news in Brazil and then works backward.
Lorena Comparato and the Cast
Lorena Comparato plays Elize, and she is the film’s clearest asset. She carries the role with a solid performance, which matters here because the feature cannot lean on novelty for long; it has to make the human behavior inside a well-known case feel immediate again.
Henrique Kimura plays Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, giving the film a second anchor in a story that otherwise risks feeling overfamiliar. Felipe Vellas directs the feature, but the dramatic lift comes less from formal tricks than from whether the actors can sustain a case viewers may already know in documentary form.
Once Upon a Crime
Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime already told the same story in four parts, so Elize Shadows of a Woman enters with a built-in comparison it does not fully escape. The review is blunt on that point: the film works in some ways, but familiarity and the lack of new insight are major obstacles.
For viewers, that means the feature is best approached as a compressed retelling rather than a replacement for the docuseries. It is not trying to reopen the case so much as repackage it into a tighter dramatic form, and the result depends on whether that shorter format feels lean or merely thinner.
Whether the feature adds anything materially new beyond the four-part docuseries is not answered by the film itself, and that is the useful takeaway: if you already saw the earlier Netflix version, this one lives or dies on Comparato’s performance and the speed of its 90-minute cut.
