A Kooky Kidnapping Inspires a Uniquely Italian Road Trip
By Laurence Lerman / New York City
The title The Kidnapping of Arabella immediately elicits every parent's worst nightmare. But Carolina Cavalli's delightfully off-center second feature turns that expectation inside out. Instead, the film unfolds as a deadpan, tender, and increasingly surreal road movie about childhood, memory, lost dreams, and the dangerous fantasy that somewhere in the past lies a better version of the life we ended up living.
Cavalli first attracted international attention with her 2022 debut, Amanda, an idiosyncratic portrait of an awkward young woman determined to reconnect with a childhood friend who barely remembers her. Funny, melancholy, and stubbornly resistant to convention, the film established Cavalli as one of the more distinctive young voices in European cinema, drawn to social misfits, emotional isolation, and the private myths people invent to survive disappointment.
With The Kidnapping of Arabella, Cavalli expands that vision. Holly (Benedetta Porcaroli) is 28, newly fired from yet another dead-end job, and convinced her life veered disastrously off course somewhere between childhood ambition and adult reality.
Then she meets Arabella (Lucrezia Guglielmino).
Eight years old, spirited, irreverent, headstrong, and delightfully defiant, Arabella has little interest in behaving like the well-mannered child the adults around her expect. Her father, Orest (Chris Pine), is a self-absorbed writer dragging her along on a promotional tour for his latest autobiographical book. Arabella, meanwhile, only wants dinner from her beloved fast food chain Taco King. When Orest refuses, she retaliates by yowling through one of his public readings—a gloriously funny introduction that tells us almost everything we need to know about her rebellious streak.
Pine delivers an enjoyable supporting performance, speaking Italian (!) as a man so absorbed in narrating his own life that he barely notices his daughter trying to assert hers. Orest isn't malicious so much as emotionally unavailable, and his distracted parenting helps explain why Arabella is so willing to disappear into her abductor Holly's increasingly fantastic adventure.
When Holly becomes convinced that Arabella is somehow her younger self, the little girl happily plays along. Their mission is nothing less than rewriting history. If Holly can somehow intervene in Arabella's childhood, perhaps she can redirect the course of her own life and still become the extraordinary person she once imagined herself becoming.
The "kidnapping," then, is both real and not real. Arabella leaves with a near stranger yet behaves less like a captive than an enthusiastic accomplice. Cavalli takes the primal fear embedded in her title—a missing child, frantic parents, an adult crossing an unforgivable boundary—and transforms it into a whimsical but emotionally resonant fable. Holly isn't simply taking Arabella away; she's trying to recover the fearless, hopeful child she believes adulthood has left behind.
Their journey unfolds through the highways, villages, seaside resorts, and open landscapes of Veneto and Emilia-Romagna, though Cavalli treats the geography as an emotional map rather than a literal one. In that sense, The Kidnapping of Arabella recalls Italy's great road movies—from Fellini's 1954 La Strada to Dino Risi's 1962 Il Sorpasso—using physical travel to reveal inner lives.
At the same time, Cavalli's dry absurdism occasionally evokes the early films of Jim Jarmusch and the Coen Brothers, finding humor in awkward pauses, strange encounters, and characters perpetually out of step with the world around them. The comparison is less one of style than sensibility; the filmmakers all understand that comedy and melancholy often occupy the very same frame.
Following its Venice premiere and an impressive international festival run, The Kidnapping of Arabella has generated exactly the kind of word-of-mouth that can transform a modest foreign-language release into an arthouse discovery. Its originality may first capture audiences' attention, but its lasting appeal appears to lie in the wonderfully unpredictable relationship between Holly and Arabella, whose chemistry gives the film its heartbeat.
Ultimately, The Kidnapping of Arabella is less interested in the mechanics of the kidnapping than in the unexpected bond that grows between the pair at its center. What begins as a bizarre act of desperation slowly reveals itself as an oddly hopeful journey, with each giving the other something she herself has been missing. Holly may never succeed in changing the past, but she discovers that she doesn't have to. By the journey's end, thanks to one irrepressible little girl with an outsized personality and an unwavering devotion to Taco King, she has discovered something even more valuable: the ability to imagine a future worth believing in.
Laurence Lerman is a film journalist and a former editor of Video Business--Variety's digital media trade publication. Over the course of his four-decade career, he has conducted one-on-one interviews with just about every major filmmaker working today, from Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Clint Eastwood to Kathryn Bigelow, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Werner Herzog. Most recently, he is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the online review site DiscDish.com, the founder and curator of FilmShul.com, a multi-part presentation on the history of Hollywood and Jewish America, and a commentator on various 4K UHD and Blu-ray home entertainment releases.
Wonderful review! I hope to see the film!