The Kidnapping of Arabella

Two years after Amanda, Carolina Cavalli’s sophomore feature, The Kidnapping of Arabella, opens with a brilliantly unsettling setup. Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), 28, disillusioned and permanently dissatisfied, encounters a seven-year-old girl in the car park of a fast-food joint whom she believes is her younger self. This might sound like the setup for a grim drama, but Cavalli tilts it into deadpan absurdism: Holly is convinced the child is her younger self. The precocious Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino) doesn’t protest; instead, she slips easily into the game, teasing her insecure novelist father – played by Chris Pine in fluent Italian – while happily colluding in Holly’s delusion. The opening passages are both funny and queasy, alive with the tension of not knowing whether this grotesque roleplay will unravel into farce or psychological horror. 

The road trip format carries a long cinematic history of self-discovery, of unlikely mentors finding in a younger companion some half-recognised version of themselves. Cavalli leans into this tradition only to invert it, as Holly as the ghost of her past, is no metaphorical mirror but an actual child strapped into the passenger seat. What might, in a conventional film, become a bittersweet exchange of wisdom across generations instead curdles into a folie à deux. Porcaroli leans into a childlike naïveté with flashes of petulance and a distinct detachment from her surroundings to deliver a performance that is both compelling and uncomfortably precise in its portrait of a generation.

Visually, there is a certain universality in the anonymous strips of highway, washed-out motels, and the doubling effect of Holly and Arabella in similar white outfits creates an uncanny blur between them despite their age difference. Yet the atmosphere alone can’t carry the film. As The Kidnapping of Arabella moves into its second half, the narrative begins to drift, and the impromptu road trip soon runs out of steam, despite being peppered with oddballs and chance encounters. As the parade of eccentrics loses its novelty, the story’s ambitions wane before grinding to a halt when the central relationship unravels. Despite Porcaroli’s sharp, unsparing performance and the screenplay’s cleverly subversive ideas, the execution ultimately lets it down.

Christina Yang

The Kidnapping of Arabella does not have a release date yet.

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Watch a clip from The Kidnapping of Arabella here: