Elize: Shadows of a Woman puts the marriage on trial, not just the murder

The facts at the center of the film are settled: in 2012, Elize Matsunaga shot her husband Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, dismembered his body, and left the remains on a roadside outside São Paulo. She turned herself in to police within days. A court sentenced her to approximately twenty years; she served a decade and has been on parole since 2022. The Matsunaga family had built the Yoki food brand into a fixture of Brazilian supermarkets. Elize had come from Chopinzinho, Paraná. The distance between those two worlds is the film’s real subject.

Elize: Shadows of a Woman, written by Raphael Montes and Mariana Torres and directed by Felipe Vellas, arrived on Netflix on July 22, 2026, with Lorena Comparato as Elize and Henrique Kimura as Marcos. It is the second time Netflix and Boutique Filmes have told this story. The first, Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime, was a four-part documentary from 2021 built substantially around Elize’s first public interview. Both arrive at the same position: the facts of the crime are on record; the psychology that produced them is not.

The 2026 drama is most effective in the middle of the marriage — before the crisis, before the crime — in scenes that register class distance without announcing it. Lorena Comparato plays Elize with controlled inwardness, often present in rooms where she is not quite at ease, rarely making explicit the gap between the life she entered and the one she came from. Henrique Kimura gives Marcos Kitano Matsunaga enough ambiguity to resist a simple villain frame, which is the right instinct for a story where the complete account belongs to only one survivor.

Vellas holds the camera at a measured remove from Elize’s interior life. Two psychological assessments of the real case — one from psychologist Jaci Ferfila, one from Claudia Lúcia Callegari Teixeira — found depressive disorder, intense dependency, and fear of abandonment rather than psychopathy. The film trusts those clinical specifics without dramatizing them directly, which gives Lorena Comparato’s performance room to suggest rather than explain.

The structural problem the film shares with the 2021 documentary is that Marcos Matsunaga cannot contest any account of the marriage, his behavior, or his treatment of Elize. Both productions come from Boutique Filmes and draw substantially from Elize’s account of what the relationship was. The film does not commit to the most honest position available: that her account may be accurate, and also impossible to independently verify.

Elize: Shadows of a Woman makes a sustained case that a crime of this kind can only be understood from inside the life that produced it. That case is convincingly made. The footage the argument is built from belongs entirely to one of the two people who were in that apartment.

Tags: Netflix, Elize Matsunaga, Raphael Montes, Jaci Ferfila, Marcos Matsunaga, Yoki