Is it possible to find an origin, a meaning, a justification for evil? Does it make sense to try to understand what is hiding behind an extreme and heinous gesture as the killing in cold blood of one’s own family member? Do you really lead to something to analyze the mind of a killer? These are the questions that asks and asks us “Elisa”, the latest film by Leonardo di Costanzo in competition at the Venice Film Festival 2025 and in the cinemas from 5 September.

The director, in fact, chooses to tell, even if in a fiction key, a story that really happened and that shocked the whole of Italy: the crime of Cirimido, the town in the province of Como where Stefania Albertani, in May 2009, killed her sister even setting fire to her body and, later, tried to do the same to her parents.

“I killed him because he was better than me,” he admitted, repenting, years later and his atrocious, terrible, chilling history is at the center of the new film by Leonardo di Costanzo who, after Ariaferma, returns to tell life within the prison and, above all, to reflect on the concept of evil, on that of repentance, on the possibility of redemption even for a killer.

“Elisa” is inspired by the studies of criminologists Adolfo Ceretti and Lorenzo Natali carried out on people responsible for heinous crimes, such as the one told in this film that sees, as the protagonist, a very good Barbara Ronchi in the role of a glacial murderer who tries to reflect on his actions, together with the help of a criminologist, to find a sense and, consequently, a way to redeem himself.

Despite his good intentions, however, this film is unable to convince to the end, does not find the right key to enter the heart of the public and tells a story that is letting himself be looked at but does not upset, not scratching, he leaves nothing more than a sense of bitterness and resignation for the ruthless banality that hides behind evil.

With a good direction, a convincing interpretation of Ronchi, a cameo by Valeria Golino who adds nothing to the story, but different gaps in writing, “Elisa” is a sufficient film but that does not make the difference and remains, after all, one of the stories that can be seen in the cinema or on TV but do not enter inside and, consequently, is forgotten to her much earlier than you can imagine.
But a good thing does it, it shows us how much the worst evil is after all “trivial” and at the same time hidden where it is less expected.

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