Director Neil Burger first formed the idea that would spawn the globe-spanning espionage thriller Inheritance during the early, claustrophobic period of the COVID-19 pandemic. “I wanted to go around the world,” he told IndieWire, “see what the new normal was, and how people were in this moment of history.” Burnt out following her mother’s passing, the film’s protagonist, Maya (Phoebe Dynevor), similarly desires an escape from her life in New York City into a new normal. Then her estranged father, Sam (Rhys Ifans), rears his head at the funeral with the promise of an overseas job opportunity. Spotting her call to adventure, Maya shoots down her sister’s reasonable skepticism about the situation and flies off. Only when she’s thousands of miles from home does Maya learn of her old man’s history of espionage. That past soon catches up to him, spurring Maya to embark on a new mission to save her dad’s skin.
Inheritance is too coherent and competent to be described as a truly bad movie, yet it’s far from the territory of a good one. There’s a terminal hollowness that sets in quickly and stays even after the plot finds a pulse. Everything seems stuck on a low vibration, starting with Maya. While Dynevor’s performance doesn’t exactly do much to elevate the material, she mainly suffers from portraying a character who’s fatally suppressed by a bland script. She has some quirks suggesting she may share a sort of “nature” with Sam, mainly a casually manipulative slipperiness that she falls back on in tight spots. But unless she’s saying what she wants or feels, she’s effectively a marionette being pulled along by the plot, completing the tasks in front of her, looking stoic but drained in the film’s intervening contemplative moments. The camera hovers on her in medium and close-up constantly, wanting you to be absorbed in her experience, teasing this sense that there is more you should be gleaning. And then you’re met with more surface, an absence of any layers to peel back. Digressions about morality and the human condition occasionally appear in key conversations, a sign the film’s narrative is at least trying to interrogate deeper questions, all to no greater cumulative effect. Inheritance is mired in a generic formula and focalized on a character sketched from the broadest of strokes, a recipe for an anesthetizing flatness that sucks the life out of the spy action beats.
Puzzlingly, Burger opts for a “guerilla, stolen style,” shooting the film entirely on iPhone. Whatever greater purpose for this there is beyond Burger’s point that “Maya herself has a little problem with stealing things,” it’s not successfully executed. The choice might undermine the film’s overall experience more than any other aspect. It registers as an attempt to conjure a covert, insurgent vibe that would enhance the immersive pull of the story, the camera’s dizzying rotations externalizing Maya’s straining psyche with every earth-shattering revelation she’s met with. Yet, nothing of substance is ever done to draw viewers in, holding them at an observational distance with little to latch onto, remote passengers dragged through clunky vignettes littered with wooden dialogue. The film’s verité aesthetic looks too much like a run-of-the-mill travel vlog to not activate that relaxed, passive Internet viewing mode your eyes glaze over into when you’re scrolling TikTok before bed. It doesn’t take long to realize Inheritance has no interesting tricks up its sleeve, no interest in the genre’s opportunities beyond the obvious, and has left you with a bit of a headache. The bones of a more capable film jut out from time to time, but what stands on them in this final version checks out at below serviceable.
DIRECTOR: Neil Burger; CAST: Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans, Necar Zadegan, Kersti Bryan; DISTRIBUTOR: IFC Films; IN THEATERS: January 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 41 min.
Published as part of January 2025 Review Roundup
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