In the fictional Netflix film, the gun is already in her hand when the fight reaches its worst point. Elize has just confronted Marcos about his affair, and instead of denying it or explaining himself, he reaches for his favorite move: invoking her past in prostitution, calling her crazy, threatening to have her psychiatrically committed, reminding her that, in a divorce, their daughter would go to him. He comes from an influential family, but she will always be – in the eyes of any judge – an ex-prostitute.

This time, with the gun pointed at him, he just keeps underestimating her. That disbelief is where he miscalculates.

“You’ve been a whore since you were a kid. Your stepfather always said so.”

That line points to the claim that her stepfather abused Elize when she was just fourteen. During the trial, her aunt alleges as much, but no one treats it as settled fact. The film does not stage that testimony or interrogate it. It does something quieter: it takes an unresolved allegation and places it in Marcos’s mouth as a weapon, the last thing he said.

The question worth asking is not whether Marcos ever spoke those exact words. It is why the filmmakers decided their audience needs to hear that accusation precisely there, one second before the trigger.

The crime happened in 2012. Marcos Matsunaga’s dismembered body was found on a road outside Cotia. Days later, Elize confessed to the crime during police questioning. For nine years, the story existed largely through headlines, courtroom footage, lawyers, and psychiatric evaluations. Elize herself remained filtered through the institutions speaking about her.

Then, in 2021, Netflix gave her a documentary. Elize Matsunaga: Once Upon a Crime presented her narrating her own story on screen, in her own voice, across four episodes. She sat before a camera and answered for herself. Her version may have been incomplete, calculated, or unreliable, but it remained recognizably hers.

Five years later, the same production company, Boutique Filmes, turned her into a fictional character.

Elize: Shadows of a Woman recasts the same material: the same crime, the same marriage, and some of the same disclosed details about her past. This time, however, an actress delivers the lines. A screenwriter decides what Elize says in the moment before she pulls the trigger, which fragments of testimony enter the story and which disappear.

That is not simply a new generation rediscovering an old case. It is the same industry deciding that it had not finished telling the story – and continuing it, this time, without Elize’s participation.

Widen the frame, and the pattern stops looking like Elize’s alone.

In October 2025, Prime Video released Tremembé, a five-episode drama set inside the real prison that has housed some of Brazil’s most discussed criminals. Suzane von Richthofen – convicted of orchestrating the 2002 murder of her parents, actually carried out by her boyfriend and his brother – arrives to find Elize Matsunaga already there, along with Anna Carolina Jatobá, convicted alongside her husband, Alexandre Nardoni, of killing his five-year-old daughter in 2008. Across five episodes, the women compete, form alliances, and betray one another in a narrative drawn from a journalist’s prison reporting.

The events did not unfold quite as the series stages them. The timelines do not overlap as neatly as the fiction requires. What Tremembé is really doing is introducing three women to one another who never shared a sentence, a cell block, or a scene in real life. It’s the camera that places them in the same room.

In Tremembé, Elize is not even the subject of her own story. She becomes a supporting character in Suzane’s arc, introduced to generate tension and serve another woman’s narrative. Across three retellings, Elize moves from narrator to fictional subject to background character.

Gender clearly has something to do with it. Daniel and Cristian Cravinhos appear in Tremembé too. So does Alexandre Nardoni. Their crimes are no less notorious. The Nardoni case, in particular, still provokes much of the same national outrage it did in 2008.

But no one is building them a cinematic universe. No one appears particularly interested in imagining what happens when they meet.

That is the part worth sitting with, beyond the true-crime appetite itself. A man who kills receives a verdict, a sentence, and, eventually, silence. A woman who kills receives a second act.

Suzane’s parricide was legally resolved in a courtroom in 2006. On screen, it’s never allowed to end. The question streaming keeps asking about her, about Elize, and about Jatobá, is not what happened. That is already on record. The question is, what kind of woman does this? And they’re asking it again and again as though the answer might change if they dramatize the story enough.

The mechanism here does not look like erasure. Elize is more visible than ever: appearing across platforms, played by a recognizable actress, and discussed on more timelines. But visibility and authorship are not the same thing. The more often Brazil retells what Elize did, the less it appears to need Elize.

Lorena Comparato, who plays the titular role in the new film, has said that taking on the part was one of the hardest things she has done as an actress. The difficulty, she explained, was not merely technical or psychological. The people affected by Elize’s actions are still alive and still dealing with the consequences. Comparato seems to understand what true crime can easily obscure: there are real people here for whom this is not content.

There is something unsettling that an actress is expressing more awareness about the story’s weight than the industry that continues to commission it.

Every new adaptation claims to be another attempt to understand a woman who committed extraordinary violence. But perhaps that is the wrong question. Violence itself is not exceptional. It is painfully ordinary. What remains exceptional, at least culturally, is the idea of a woman committing it. As long as that remains the mystery we keep returning to, these stories risk teaching us less about violence than about our own fascination with the women who cross a line that too many men live on the other side of.