It presents a scenario that is ripe for discourse, one wherein a wide-eyed teenager is suddenly left with the difficult decision of expressing her allegiance to either her absentee mother or an aunt who has dedicated her entire life to her upbringing. This is one of the biggest problems of The Heiress. There is literally no room for any other interpretation that she is motivated by evil. Soriano is in the movie because she contributes a certain presence, a supposedly oppressive ambivalence to a character whose maternal attachment to her niece has become suspect when her sister suddenly arrives from working abroad for many years. It just means that the character of Soriano is just woefully one-note, and could have been played by any other actress without a legacy to be wasted. This isn’t to say that their characters are satisfyingly complex. It is just that the characters played by Cruz and Salvador have more room to navigate. In fact, Soriano is out-performed by Sunshine Cruz, who plays her sister, and Janella Salvador, who plays the titular heiress who is fated to inherit the demonic powers of Soriano’s character. Soriano in The Heiress is ineffective, not because she does not have the skills to humanize a villainess but because the villainess is simply a lousily written character. The veteran actress, who fluently echoed the emotional struggles of a pregnant woman contemplating abortion in a judgmental society in Ishmael Bernal’s Hinugot sa Langit (1985), and who found subtle complications in horror tropes in Peque Gallaga and Lore Reyes’ Sa Piling ng Aswang (1999) and Bobby Bonifacio’s Numbalikdiwa (2006) and Chito Rono’s T2 (2009), is wasted in the film, throwing menacing looks and unbelievable maternal doting without a hint of rhyme or reason. It is its absolute refusal to make use of the talent of Maricel Soriano, relegating her to a role that is bereft of emotional complication. However, it isn’t its lack of ambition and imagination that is most frustrating. Frasco Mortiz’s The Heiress is another run-of-the-mill horror that wastes an opportunity to draw fear from very real familial discord all for the sake of easy shock and grisly spectacle.
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