In a study of the mother-daughter relationship that takes on the contours of a therapeutic device, Narcisa’s Will (Herança de Narcisa) (2026), by Clarissa Appelt and Daniel Dias, blurs the lines between horror and drama to represent grief and the fear of becoming like our parents through a visual primer of possession. The narrative follows Ana (Paolla Oliveira), a woman who returns home after the death of her mother, the singer and dancer Narcisa (Rosamaria Murtinho). Narcisa’s Will converts horror into the drama of contemporary adulthood: we watch our parents grow old while fearing we will inherit precisely what we have spent our lives trying to avoid.
Paolla Oliveira plays two characters: Ana, the grieving daughter, and Narcisa in her youth. The choice is provocative and lays bare part of the narrative’s dilemma: the two are the same. Supporting characters even confuse mother and daughter in brief exchanges, among them Diego (Paulo Henrique Muller), Ana’s brother, and Inês (Elvira Helena), a family friend.
The production design reinforces this resemblance through period photographs in which Oliveira appears as Narcisa, images Ana observes with a mixture of horror and fascination expressed in the actress’ frightened gaze. Indeed, the production work is exquisite: vinyl record covers bearing Narcisa’s face (the same face as Ana’s) are treated as perfectly natural by the characters, generating a certain humor through the surreal omnipresence of Oliveira’s face.
Ana’s clothes are loose, in beige and pastel tones, contrasting with the glamorous palette of her mother’s blue and yellow robes and sequins; Ana has a tired face and a downcast gaze, almost always without makeup, avoiding the crimson lipstick and the red ribbon her mother wore around her neck. Ana sleeps downstairs, on the sofa, deliberately avoiding her mother’s bedroom with its large, comfortable bed, even though she is alone in the house for much of the story.
Narcisa, in turn, remains shrouded in mystery. At first, we see her only in glimpses, presented in her golden years through black-and-white scenes. The image is glamorous: a stunning, voluptuous woman singing marchinhas, dressed in exquisite costumes marked by glitter. A second coming of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), before the downfall. The initial version of Narcisa available to Ana is the one her mother prepared to convey beauty and success. The lyrics of one of her songs are almost prophetic: “…mommy is coming!”
Although we are not necessarily situated in the present day (an interesting choice), we lose all sense of how much time has passed since Narcisa lost her stardom. The main characters have no cell phones or electronic devices, and television occupies a recurring place in the house. Videos are recorded on VHS tapes, and the house has a landline telephone.
Was Narcisa successful in the 1930s and are we now in the 1970s? Or was she successful in the 1960s and are we now in the 2000s? Difficult to say. This immersion in a house that clings to a glorious past generates disorientation at first glance. As Ana shouts later on, this house is Narcisa herself.
Dream scenes reinforce the surreal component. Ana hears loud noises coming from the locked crimson door of her mother’s dressing room, as though something wanted to burst through the wood. Under the house’s somber lighting, Ana hesitates to open it. The dark mansion contrasts with the mysterious, fulgurant purple light emanating from beneath the door.
The play of shadows reveals the protagonist’s two faces: daylight lends sobriety to Oliveira’s performance, emphasizing the dark circles under her eyes and lines on her face. Her empty gaze suggests an ambivalent daughter wounded by grief as she empties closets and dressing tables of her mother’s belongings, forced to recall parts of her childhood and her relationship with Narcisa.
At night, dusk transforms the house into a haunted mausoleum, with rarefied points of light, and Ana’s opaque eyes make her a perfect receptacle for the mysterious manifestations attributed to the matriarch, accompanied by sudden sounds. Red ribbons emerge from beneath the door and pull the protagonist toward the dressing room. The manifest inheritance drags the protagonist along.
The inheritance Narcisa left behind returns, reinforcing the tone of horror. The protagonist involuntarily repeats her mother’s mannerisms and feels increasingly drawn to the clothes she wore; she abandons her sober clothing and adorns herself with chartreuse feathers and refined yellow sequins, awkwardly applying eyeshadow and crimson lipstick seen in the mother’s countless portraits. By emulating aspects of Narcisa, Ana’s individuality is called into question.
By making room for her mother to enter, she gives up the possibility of finding her own path; she is replaced by someone she does not want to become. The editing shows the key to Narcisa’s dressing room: it is the only one missing from the keyring and, at times, appears on the breakfast table or among Ana’s own clothes.
The ambivalence of connecting with Narcisa becomes a threat of imprisonment. The screenplay goes further when it returns to the red ribbons introduced in the protagonist’s opening monologue. In the family tradition, the women of the house wore them as a symbol that mother and daughter would always remain connected. The ribbon would bring her close to her mother even in death.
Marcelo Conti opts for an original score with ethereal passages and dissonant tension that evoke Akira Yamaoka’s work on the video game Silent Hill 2 (2001), transfiguring the dramatic construction of maternal rejection into familial horror. Conti very effectively accentuates the duality between a daughter’s resentment and the effort toward reconciliation through tonalities that convey threat and melancholy. The resulting ambiance heightens the plot’s sense of mystery.
Oliveira begins to adopt a reflective tone, her gaze lingering over the house. Her mother’s clothes fit her perfectly, as do the shoes. Ana replicates maternal acts she had denounced to her brother: standing before the mirror, shouting that she was ridiculous, and striking the surface, cutting her hand. Understanding Narcisa becomes possible only when Ana replicates a gesture she had previously judged solely from the outside. Some scenes previously treated with silence and gravity are reinterpreted as signs of vulnerability, such as a cabinet full of prescription medication for insomnia: there was a woman who raised two children alone even amid difficulties.
Narcisa’s Will turns toward melodrama when Ana finally enters her mother’s dressing room. The door, signaled from the beginning, draws attention with its rounded red jambs. The red ribbon that continuously pulls Ana toward the locked door hurts like a chain that binds and punishes whoever dares to cross the portal between Earth and Hell. When this portal is crossed, we move through an almost endless room, like Narcisa’s mental archive. The camera follows Ana’s steps from behind her shoulders through a labyrinth of costumes, or identities, bathed in violet lights and dry-ice smoke.
The film then stages the final encounter between mother and daughter and, abruptly, dismantles the suspense. In Rosamaria Murtinho’s only and touching appearance onscreen, a delicate woman is found beneath masks and costumes. Murtinho’s gentleness, expressed through an affectionate gaze and the touch of her hand as she intertwines her trembling fingers with Ana’s, catalyzes the dramatic turn by transforming supernatural haunting into comprehensible memory.
Yet the shift is rushed and ultimately unsurprising because of the obviousness of a climax prepared since the first act. The encounter evokes the familiar fear of watching one’s mother grow frail with age and lose her vigor. Even so, the encounter seems redemptive for Narcisa, and the screenplay is reductive in failing to consider that understanding or forgiving our parents’ painful actions does not erase the scars they eventually leave on us. Understanding is different from absolving.
Narcisa’s Will is not subtle in its comparisons or its turns, which weakens its dramatic arc precisely because its symbols remain too readily comprehensible. We then humanize the ghost that inhabited the house and now becomes part of future generations through a ribbon that no longer pulls or binds, but instead adorns a child’s hair.