A wrong turn becomes a second chance.
You must dig out the official U.S. trailer for The Kidnapping of Arabella, a wonderfully strange Italian dark comedy in which one chance encounter becomes something far more complicated.
Benedetta Porcaroli stars as Holly, a disillusioned 28-year-old who has become convinced that she is living the wrong version of her life.
Then she meets Arabella, an eight-year-old rebel played by Lucrezia Guglielmino—and decides the child must somehow be her younger self returning through a hole in time.
Enter Carolina Cavalli’s funny, melancholy and delightfully unhinged road movie.
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Arabella is already looking for a way to escape her self-absorbed father and the life being decided around her. Rather than correcting Holly’s increasingly cosmic theory, the mischievous child simply plays along.
The two set off together on an unconventional road trip, accidentally creating what everyone else understandably interprets as a kidnapping.
Holly believes she has been given a chance to return to the beginning and become someone special. Arabella mostly wants to run away and see where the lie takes them.
What follows is not a traditional kidnapping thriller. Writer-director Carolina Cavalli instead builds a dry, tender and frequently bizarre story about regret, unmet expectations and the fear that life is always happening somewhere else.
Porcaroli’s performance earned her the Orizzonti Award for Best Actress when the film premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival.
Her Holly moves between total conviction and complete emotional disorientation, holding onto the idea of Arabella as a second chance because accepting the present would require admitting that no alternate life is coming to rescue her.
Guglielmino meets that nervous energy with the fearless logic of a child who realizes the adults may be far less certain about life than they pretend to be.
Chris Pine appears as Arabella’s deadpan novelist father, delivering his performance in Italian while attempting to understand how his daughter vanished into someone else’s identity crisis.
The result looks like a road movie, a coming-of-age story in reverse and an idiosyncratic homage to sisterhood colliding at the same strange intersection.
It asks whether we can actually repair the past—or whether growing up means finally making peace with the one life we were given.
Press play on thee funny, melancholy and delightfully off-center official trailer right below.
Watch The Kidnapping of Arabella official trailer.
Benedetta Porcaroli and Lucrezia Guglielmino rewrite the past during an unconventional road trip, while Chris Pine searches for his missing daughter.
Sources: The official Oscilloscope Laboratories trailer provided the featured video and U.S. release information; Film at Lincoln Center provided the synopsis, character details and festival background; La Biennale di Venezia provided the official cast, production credits and director’s statement.
