The grainy monochrome footage, pulled from a security camera inside a São Paulo apartment building, shows a woman in a cap steering a trolley laden with three large suitcases into the lift. It was 20 May 2012, and the suitcases held the dismembered body of Marcos Kitano Matsunaga, heir to a food conglomerate. That image, which Brazilian investigators would later trace to a premeditated clean-up, is the factual bedrock on which Netflix has built its new psychological drama “Elize: Sombras de uma Mulher” (Elize: Shadows of a Woman).

The film, released on 22 July 2026, does not open with the crime. Instead, it steps backwards into the eight-year relationship between Elize Matsunaga, a former high-end escort from rural Paraná, and Marcos, a wealthy businessman with a passion for hunting and a private arsenal of thirty firearms. Drawing on court documents, the earlier Netflix docuseries about the case and fresh interviews with detectives, screenwriters Raphael Montes and Mariana Torres reconstruct a courtship and marriage corroded by class resentment, infidelity and threats of psychiatric institutionalisation. Montes has described the project as an attempt “to open a dialogue about violence — what led Elize to commit such a brutal act?” The result is a script that invents dialogue, compresses a timeline of nearly a decade into roughly three years on screen, and adopts Elize’s point of view so thoroughly that the story becomes, in effect, an argument for her subjectivity.

The bare facts remain grimly simple. On 19 May 2012, after receiving proof from a private detective that Marcos had another lover, Elize confronted him in their flat. During the argument, she shot him in the head with a .380 calibre pistol — a gift from her husband. She then dismembered the body and dumped the remains in a wooded area of Cotia, on the outskirts of the city. Brazilian courts convicted her of qualified homicide and concealment of a corpse, handing down a sentence of nearly twenty years, later reduced to sixteen years and three months on appeal. By May 2022, she had been granted conditional release and was serving the remainder of her term outside prison. The case has not left the public imagination: the mixture of wealth, sexual power dynamics and extreme violence turned it into one of the most mediatised trials of the decade.

Netflix’s decision to revisit the Matsunaga story through fiction — after already producing the documentary “Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime” — mirrors a broader editorial wager. The streaming service has been investing heavily in local-language true-crime adaptations that promise both domestic pull and global curiosity. Brazilian commentators note that the fascination is not merely prurient; the film’s exploration of the couple’s power imbalance and the suspicion that Elize’s fears of losing her daughter were exploited touches deeper anxieties about gender and class in the country. In the same July window, Netflix also released a Korean supernatural palace mystery, “The East Palace”, and a Turkish romantic thriller, “Un ladrón romántico”, each targeting distinct domestic audiences while extending the platform’s non-English catalogue. Yet it is the São Paulo crime drama, with its claustrophobic interiors and its central performance by Lorena Comparato, that has climbed fastest into the platform’s top ten across Latin America.

The film ends, as all such reconstructions must, with the same security-camera footage that opened the investigation. But its lasting image is not the lift doors closing; it is the deer head mounted on the apartment wall, a trophy from the couple’s hunting trips, silent witness to a private war that pundits are still trying to decode.