A Hollywood Face, an Italian Soul: On 'The Kidnapping of Arabella'
By Natalie McCarty
There was a brief chapter of my life in which I dated a well-accomplished Italian independent filmmaker. While I wouldn't claim that proximity alone confers expertise, I did absorb enough through osmosis to develop an appreciation for the peculiar ecosystem that is Italian indie cinema. It is a tradition that often privileges atmosphere over accessibility, introspection over narrative momentum, and artistic conviction over commercial viability. (My former fling once made a three-hour film about a piece of octopus. I still don’t understand it.)
So when The Kidnapping of Arabella crossed my desk, I felt transported back to Catalina Island and back into the trenches of that very specific, ambiguous cinematic world.
Courtesy of IMDb
The film follows Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli), a woman drifting through the monotony of a dead-end existence, who becomes convinced that Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino)—an eight-year-old girl attempting to escape her self-absorbed novelist father—is actually her younger self, returned through a tear in the space-time continuum. Their ensuing road trip unfolds less as a traditional narrative than as an emotional meditation on regret, identity, and the enduring fantasy of rewriting the past.
Director Carolina Cavalli embraces magical and emotional realism to coexist without feeling compelled to reconcile them. The result is a film less interested in explaining its metaphysics than in illuminating the emotional truths they reveal. At its best, The Kidnapping of Arabella possesses a tenderness, finding poignancy in the relationship between two lost souls who may (or may not) be versions of the same fractured self.
That is also what makes Chris Pine’s involvement in the film so intriguing. His presence is obviously strategic: a familiar (but not too familiar) Hollywood face serving as a bridge between a European sensibility and an American audience that has historically been less receptive to slower, more contemplative storytelling. It is unexpected casting, but not incongruous. Pine wisely resists the gravitational pull of movie-star charisma, settling instead into the film’s melancholic register. Rather than disrupting the film’s atmosphere, he becomes part of its strange rhythm.
Courtesy of IMDb
Yet for all its ambition, The Kidnapping of Arabella never quite achieves the ineffable quality that allows certain European art-house films to transcend festival acclaim and resonate more broadly. It is thoughtful, elegant, and often visually arresting, but there remains a persistent sense that something vital—an emotional spark, an elusive rhythm, an indefinable je ne sais quoi—never fully materializes.
Perhaps the film’s most affecting moment arrives in its final sequence, when one character reflects: “And then you’ll remember when your dreams were different. The idea of the future excited you and made you infinite.” It is a line that crystallizes the film’s central preoccupation with the distance between who we imagined we would become and who we ultimately are. For a fleeting moment, The Kidnapping of Arabella reaches the emotional depth it had been seeking all along.
Of course, not every Italian meditation on longing, memory, and self-discovery is destined to become Call Me by Your Name. Few films are. But The Kidnapping of Arabella occupies similar emotional terrain, even if it ultimately lacks the cinematic alchemy that transforms an intriguing premise into something truly unforgettable.
