My criticism of this film is in no way meant to disrespect director Petra Costa’s pain regarding her sister’s suicide, which clearly comes across in this artistic processing of the event and its aftermath. I just found her artistic approach exasperating, ineffective, and frankly a bit indulgent. She’s in love with blurry images – people, streets, handwriting, everything is shot blurry, with weird, harsh lighting effects and a giggly camera, the whole length of the movie. This technique can be very powerful when applied sparingly, but a whole movie worth is simply grating and exhausting. I had to close my eyes toward the end of the film, because I was getting a headache from watching it.

The film’s narration suffers from a similar problem. It’s done as a kind of long, semi-poetic letter to her deceased sister, kind of like the tapes the sister used to send home to Brazil from New York. The problem is that it isn’t very informative or interesting, and her voice is not very sonorous, so unless you go into the film steeled to weep crocodile tears for Pertra Costa’s loss, the net effect is you’re slowly bludgeoned with this tiresome monologue that is weirdly-structured, does not evolve, is not terribly moving, and is on the whole rather dull; you want to grieve (to a certain extent) for the sister, but the film’s technique makes it surprisingly difficult.

Lastly, I felt the film’s score was a blatant rip-off of the score of Sideways. It’s never a good thing when the viewer’s attention is continually pulled externally in this manner.

Elena is obviously the kind of film that really appeals to a certain type of movie-goer. If you like the idea of unstructured narration, blurry, artsy camerawork, and a free-form approach to scripting and scene composition, by all means go for it. For everyone else, this 80 minute film felt like a 2 hour and 15 minute movie to me, 2 hours and 15 minutes of visual and auditory torture. I highly recommend that you avoid it.