Five years after the documentary series Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime, Netflix has returned to one of Brazil’s most disturbing criminal cases. This time, the story is told not through interviews, archival material, and court records, but as a psychological drama: Elize: Shadows of a Woman, starring Lorena Comparato.

The connection between the two productions goes beyond their subject. The film was produced by Boutique Filmes, the same company behind the 2021 documentary. It is directed by DNA do Crime filmmaker Felipe Vellas, based on a story by Raphael Montes and a screenplay written by Montes and Mariana Torres, both associated with Good Morning, Verônica. Henrique Kimura plays Marcos Matsunaga, with Denise Weinberg, Miwa Yanagizawa, and Julia Shimura also in the cast.

I tend to be particularly critical of Brazilian films, perhaps more so than I should be. That is precisely why the quality of this production deserves recognition. The screenplay is solid, the direction is assured, the visual reconstruction is meticulous, and most of the cast deliver convincing performances.

Comparato never turns Elize into a caricature or attempts a mechanical imitation of the woman once seen across Brazilian television news. Her performance is restrained, ambiguous, and deeply unsettling.

The film works. It works as a psychological thriller, as a marital drama, and as the portrait of a relationship shaped by money, class, infidelity, power, jealousy, and fear. Unsurprisingly, Elize: Shadows of a Woman reached number one among Netflix films in Brazil.

The problem lies precisely in how well it works.

The crime that shocked Brazil

In May 2012, 42-year-old businessman Marcos Kitano Matsunaga was shot and killed inside the São Paulo apartment he shared with Elize and their young daughter. Elize then dismembered his body, placed the remains in suitcases and plastic bags, and abandoned them in a wooded area outside the city.

She confessed after investigators confronted her with the evidence. According to her account, she fired the shot during an argument after discovering that Marcos was once again having an affair. What followed was a meticulous effort to destroy and conceal his body inside their home.

In December 2016, after a seven-day trial, Elize was sentenced to 19 years, 11 months, and one day in prison for qualified homicide and for destroying and concealing the body. The jury concluded that the victim had been denied any possibility of defending himself, although it rejected two other aggravating circumstances sought by prosecutors. In 2019, Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice reduced the homicide sentence to 16 years and three months after recognizing her confession as a mitigating factor.

The case contained nearly every classic element of true crime: a wealthy family, a marriage built across an enormous class divide, infidelity, sex, money, security cameras, a disappearance, and the revelation that the person initially claiming to search for the victim had caused his death.

There was also something Brazilian society found particularly difficult to process: a woman had killed her wealthy husband, dismembered his body, and attempted to conceal the crime.

A story told by the person who survived

Both the 2021 documentary and the new film place Elize’s perspective at the center of the narrative. That does not mean either production denies the crime or declares her innocent. The murder and dismemberment remain part of the story. The question is how the audience is emotionally led toward them.

The film immerses us in Elize’s jealousy, humiliation, fear, and growing paranoia. Marcos is portrayed as unfaithful, arrogant, controlling, and cruel. Every gesture appears to validate her insecurity. Every exchange pushes the relationship closer to an explosion that begins to feel inevitable.

As drama, it works. There is, however, an unavoidable problem: we do not know exactly what happened during the private moments of that marriage. There are no recordings of their arguments. We do not know the precise content of their last conversation. We cannot confirm every threat, humiliation, or line of dialogue attributed to Marcos. Much of what is known about that intimate space comes from Elize, the only person who left the apartment alive.

The film does not pretend to be a documentary. For cinema to exist, it must fill gaps, imagine conversations, and transform scattered facts into a coherent narrative. Netflix itself presents the production as a dramatized adaptation about the deterioration of the marriage, not as a literal reconstruction of every event.

There is still a difference between creating dramatic truth and allowing it to be received as historical truth.

Because the audience experiences most of the story through Elize’s eyes, Marcos becomes more than the victim who can no longer speak. He also becomes the film’s primary defendant, condemned through conversations and private behavior whose full context remains unknowable and which he can no longer challenge.

This does not mean Marcos was a good husband. His infidelity was not merely an allegation made by Elize: she had hired a private investigator and obtained evidence of the affair. But one confirmed betrayal does not automatically authenticate every private scene built around it.

Being unfaithful, arrogant, or even emotionally abusive does not make anyone responsible for being murdered.

Elize was also judged for being a woman

There is, however, an essential distinction to preserve. Questioning the sympathy built around Elize must not lead to the opposite distortion: erasing the misogyny, sexual moralism, and class prejudice that shaped both her trial and the media coverage surrounding it.

The 2021 documentary is right to show how disproportionately Elize’s past as a sex worker influenced the way she was presented to the public. At times, it seemed that Brazil was not merely judging a woman who had committed a brutal crime. It was also judging a poor woman who had sold sexual services, married a millionaire, and crossed social boundaries that had never been intended for her.

Documentary director Eliza Capai explicitly argued that examining the sexism surrounding the case did not mean excusing the murder. Her purpose was also to expose the moral and media judgment directed at Elize as a woman, particularly in relation to her sexuality and her past.

Elize came from extreme poverty in Chopinzinho, a small town in the southern Brazilian state of Paraná. During the trial, an aunt testified that Elize had been sexually abused by her stepfather as a teenager. She left that environment, moved first to Curitiba and later to São Paulo, found ways to support herself, studied and built a family. There was courage, strength and an extraordinary capacity for reinvention in that journey.

None of this should be dismissed as irrelevant. A person’s life before a crime remains part of who they are. Elize did not begin to exist at the moment she killed Marcos Matsunaga.

But none of it can justify what happened.

It is possible to recognize that she experienced abuse, poverty, abandonment and prejudice. It is possible to acknowledge that her trial was shaped by misogyny. It is possible to see the profound imbalance of power within the marriage. And it is still possible to state, without hesitation, that she killed her husband, dismembered his body, and attempted to conceal the crime.

Both truths must be allowed to stand.

Understanding is not absolution

Perhaps the greatest strength of Elize: Shadows of a Woman is also its most dangerous trap. The film humanizes someone who was reduced for years to the image of a cold and calculating killer. It gives us her origins, fears, weaknesses, and fascination with a life that once appeared impossibly distant from the one into which she had been born.

Elize does not need to be turned into a monster for her responsibility to be acknowledged.

Nor does she need to become the heroine of a story about class mobility, abuse, and survival for us to recognize the prejudice she endured.

The problem is not the attempt to understand her. Fiction exists precisely to enter morally uncomfortable territory, reject easy answers, and investigate how ordinary people become capable of extreme acts.

The problem begins when understanding moves dangerously close to over-explanation. When every betrayal, threat, and humiliation is arranged so efficiently that the murder begins to feel less like a choice than the emotional conclusion of a story.

Elize’s biography may help us understand her personality, her fears, and her relationship with power. It cannot turn Marcos’s murder into the inevitable consequence of his own failures.

The film gives Elize all the complexity a central character deserves. Marcos receives less. He exists primarily as the man who betrayed her, humiliated her, and threatened the life she had struggled to build. Even in death, he remains the antagonist.

That may reveal less about what truly happened inside the apartment than it does about every compelling narrative’s need to find a villain.

Where is Elize Matsunaga today?

Elize left the Tremembé women’s prison in May 2022 after serving approximately ten years and began serving the remainder of her sentence on conditional release. Among the conditions imposed by the court were requirements to report her address and occupation.

Now 44, she reportedly lives a discreet life in Franca, in the state of São Paulo. Recent reports say she works in the pet-products and services sector, after having also attempted to work as a ride-share driver.

Elize served the portion of her sentence required under Brazilian law to qualify for conditional release. She therefore has the right to rebuild her life within the restrictions imposed by the justice system. Recognizing that right does not require minimizing her crime. Likewise, recognizing the brutality of the murder does not justify using her past to deny her humanity forever.

Perhaps that is the real discomfort produced by Elize: Shadows of a Woman. As cinema, it is excellent. As a psychological thriller, it is absorbing. As a Brazilian production, it deserves recognition for its technical quality, its screenplay and, above all, Lorena Comparato’s performance.

But as a narrative inspired by a real crime, it repeats the central problem of the 2021 documentary: it allows the only person able to describe what happened inside that marriage to determine who the man she killed was.

Elize deserves to be understood as more than her crime. Marcos deserves not to be remembered exclusively through the version offered by the person who took his life.

When only one of two people survives to tell the story, turning that memory into truth is never a neutral choice.