Five years after Horse Money, which Charles Mudede called "a film you will remember more for its images and episodes than its story," the nonprofessional actor Vitalina Varela reprises her role as a character who shares her name, a widow who travels to Lisbon to try to piece together her estranged husband's last days. Richard Brody of the New Yorker writes, "From the start, Costa endows the tale with a pictorial majesty, rooted in a hands-on transformation of film-noir, Expressionist-rooted cinematography. His images (realized by the director of photography Leonardo Simões) feature piercing bursts of light and sepulchral shadows, striated and fragmentary illumination that blends with largely static frames to fuse space and mood, action and emotion."