“Taco King!” Arabella yells. “Taxes! Jonathan Franzen!” (Orest appears to both have a gauzy relationship with government levies as well as a burning jealousy of his American peer, in one of the film’s best running gags.) Eventually the event winds down and Orest, having exhausted his composure, instructs his driver to give Arabella what she wants. Because The Kidnapping Of Arabella is primed to focus on adult derelictions of duty, the driver promptly wanders off and leaves the child alone. Then she spies Holly and selects her as her abductor; from the outset, it’s abundantly clear that Arabella has an even greater facility than most kids for telling adults what they want to hear, and Holly, burdened as she is by the weight of her childhood failures, instantly sees the girl as her younger self, come from the past for an existential do-over.
The Kidnapping Of Arabella is at once explicit and mum on the subject of Holly’s mental health troubles, something Porcaroli captures in her doe-eyed and restless performance. This is a person whose toxic youth so profoundly scarred her that Arabella is, to her, more an opportunity to make good on her own promise as a child than a misplaced and unsupervised kid in her own right. Holly had it impressed upon her as a girl, by her would-be dance teacher, Granatina (Eva Robin’s), that she was special, an honorific that haunts her as a grown-up working an unsatisfying job while she completes her physics degree. Cavalli leaves the truth of Holly’s academic pursuits fuzzy, as if to invite the audience to question whether she’s actually a student or maybe just a neurotic woman-child seeking any possible relief from her embarrassment at amounting to less than she was told she’d be. What’s unquestionable is that she’s unhappy and unfulfilled, and Arabella’s keen empathetic instincts—plus her urge to put Orest through the wringer—pick up Holly’s despondency like military-grade sonar.
Cavalli has a terrific sense of humor and a droll aesthetic, seemingly drawing from an influential well filled by drops of Wes Anderson, Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola, and the Coen brothers. The Kidnapping Of Arabella also sets a high bar for road trip films: the journey is worthier than the destination, as it should be, but specifically because the film’s journey lives up to every definition of the word on philosophical, comical, and emotional levels. Holly accepts guardianship of Arabelle the minute the girl gets into her car, though it does take time for the gravity of that responsibility to sink in; Arabella isn’t Holly’s kid, but she is her ward, and as much as Arabella is a pain in the ass (“rompicazzo” in Italian; congratulations, you have been cultured), she’s also an adorable moppet, invested with guileless wisdom by Guglielmino. It’s difficult to hold her actions against her. Besides: Holly really ought to know better.
The fact that she doesn’t is the key to The Kidnapping Of Arabella‘s chief motif: Children with unrealized potential eventually become adults with dissatisfying lives. Holly should understand, among other things, that time travel isn’t real, that Arabella isn’t her eight-year-old self, and that even if she is, the correct thing to do is to take her back to Orest, even if Orest—played with wonderful laconic weariness by the best movie star named “Chris”—is about as far down the list of “father of the year” candidates as one can get before they hit Elon Musk. But she’s blinded by her perceived inadequacies, and makes the absolute worst choice available, which, at least, leads to a pretty good film.
Director: Carolina Cavalli
Writer: Carolina Cavalli
Starring: Benedetta Porcaroli, Lucrezia Guglielmino, Chris Pine, Eva Robin’s
Release Date: July 10, 2026
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