“Arsa” Review: A Strange, Beautiful Coming-of-Age Story Set on a Volcanic Island

Every so often a film comes along that’s hard to explain without sounding like you’re making it up. Arsa is one of those. A teenage girl lives alone on a volcanic island. She turns sea trash into sculpture. Then a tourist boy shows up and can’t stop watching her, and her whole world cracks open. Said out loud, it sounds like a fable. On screen, it feels closer to something you half-remember from a dream.

That’s Arsa, the first narrative feature from the Italian artist duo MASBEDO — Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni. It’s one of the more distinctive Italian films to land in theaters this year.

What’s It About

Arsa is eighteen, give or take. She lives alone in a crumbling shack at the edge of an island, somewhere between the sea and everyone else’s version of normal life. She doesn’t go looking for company. Through a pair of binoculars, she watches the tourists come and go, keeping the world at a comfortable distance.

What she does instead is collect. Along the shoreline, she gathers the junk the ocean keeps spitting back onto land — old plastic, rusted metal, whatever washes up. Then she reshapes it into small sculptures in her workshop. It’s not a hobby. It’s more like an inheritance. Her late father was a sculptor, and a demanding, cynical patron twisted his real talent into crowd-pleasing, “pretty” statues. Arsa never got the version of him that made honest art. So she finishes the job herself, working in the material nobody else wants.

Then three young men land on the island and rent a holiday house nearby. Arsa’s solitude was never really a hiding place — it was just how she lived on her own terms. Now it has visitors. One of them, Andrea, becomes fixated on her. Instead of staying an outsider looking in, he pushes his way toward her world. He finds something there he wasn’t prepared for.

The Island as a Character

The best thing Arsa has going for it is the island itself. The film was shot on Stromboli, in Sicily’s Aeolian archipelago. MASBEDO shoot it less like scenery and more like a character with its own moods. Wind, waves, black volcanic rock — the directors have said the location fought them at every turn during production. Somehow that friction made it into the finished film. There’s a rawness to the way the island is captured that a studio backlot could never fake.

A Striking Debut Performance

Gala Zohar Martinucci makes her big-screen debut in the lead role, and she carries a lot of the film on presence alone. Arsa doesn’t explain herself. Martinucci doesn’t ask the audience for sympathy either — she just lets the character exist, guarded and strange and fully believable as someone who grew up talking to the sea more than to people. It’s a tough role to pull off in a first performance, and she mostly does.

What’s Really Going On Underneath

Where the film gets more interesting is what it’s actually about underneath the plot. This isn’t really a story about a girl and a boy. It’s about what people do with pain they didn’t choose. Arsa’s sculptures — built out of “archeoplastic,” the trash the tide won’t stop returning — are a direct answer to her father’s compromise. They answer the beautiful lies he was forced to make for money. She takes the ugly, discarded stuff and turns it into something true instead. The film keeps circling that idea without ever hammering it into the dialogue, and that restraint is much to its credit.

When Andrea Arrives

Andrea’s arrival complicates that world, and this is where Arsa takes its biggest swing. His fascination with her tips from curiosity into something more obsessive. The film lets that discomfort sit rather than resolving it neatly. It won’t be for every viewer — some will find the back half slippery or ambiguous on purpose. But it reads as an intentional choice, not a script that lost its footing.

Direction and Visual Style

This is where MASBEDO’s background as visual artists really shows — their prior work has screened at Venice and other major festivals. The compositions favor long, patient takes over quick cuts. The film trusts silence in a way a lot of coming-of-age dramas don’t, and it won’t rush you anywhere. If you want a movie that holds you at arm’s length before letting you in, this one rewards the patience.

Where It Stumbles

Arsa is a mood piece first and a plot second. That trade-off will land differently depending on what you’re in the mood for. The three young tourists outside of Andrea are thin, mostly there to disrupt Arsa’s world rather than exist as people in their own right. The back half’s ambiguity is purposeful, but it occasionally tips into vagueness. There are a couple of stretches where you may find yourself wanting the film to just say the thing it’s circling.

It also asks a lot of Martinucci in her first film role. She mostly delivers, but a couple of the quieter emotional beats land softer than they’re clearly meant to.

The Verdict

Arsa isn’t a film built for easy recommendations. It’s slow, it’s elliptical, and it trusts its audience to sit with discomfort instead of explaining it away. But if you’re drawn to films that treat landscape as emotion, and grief as something you can literally build with your hands, this is a striking, confident debut. MASBEDO are clearly more interested in feeling than formula.

Rating: 3.5/5

Watch the Trailer

Quick Facts

• Title: Arsa
• Directed by: MASBEDO (Nicolò Massazza & Iacopo Bedogni)
• Written by: Giorgio Vasta, with MASBEDO
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 1h 34m
• Language: Italian
• Country: Italy
• Starring: Gala Zohar Martinucci, Jacopo Olmo Antinori, Lino Musella, Tommaso Ragno, Giovanni Cannata, Luca Chikovani, Michele Sinisi
• Filming location: Stromboli, Aeolian Islands
• World premiere: Rome Film Fest, Freestyle Film section, October 2024
• US release: September 18, 2026, via Obscured Releasing

Where to Watch

Arsa opens in US theaters on September 18, 2026, courtesy of Obscured Releasing. Check local listings for showtimes near you.

Final Thoughts

Arsa won’t work for everyone, and it doesn’t seem interested in trying to. What it offers instead is a singular setting, a fearless lead performance, and a strange, patient story. It’s about turning what the world throws away into something worth keeping. Give it room to breathe and it’ll stay with you.

Have you seen “Arsa”? Let us know what you thought in the comments.