INHERITANCE (2025) - Mark Reviews Movies

Inheritance, IFC Films

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 23, 2025

Co-writer/director Neil Burger isn't too concerned with the characters or tone of Inheritance. Indeed, one could argue this travelogue of a thriller isn't much worried about its plot, either, considering how by-the-books, basic, and minimal it is.

The point here is less about what happens, which amounts to a young woman trying to find and figure out what to do with a MacGuffin, and more about how it happens, both on the screen and behind the scenes. Burger and his filmmaking team travel the globe to four different countries, following the protagonist as she reunites with her father and has to save him after he's abducted, without much in terms of equipment, apparently.

It's no surprise to learn that the director and cinematographer Jackson Hunt shot the entire movie on a cellphone, because the camerawork here is so shaky, nimble, and intimate that, well, it looks exactly that way. There are some worthwhile scenes in the movie, including a chase through the narrow streets and narrower alleyways of New Delhi, and the process of making it leads to some impromptu moments that add some sense of realism, such as anytime a random passerby stops to look at star Phoebe Dynevor in some state of emotional distress. All things considered, it's very possible some of these unwitting extras didn't notice the phone recording her performance and wondered if they should be worried about this quite harried-looking woman.

The reason Dynevor's Maya is initially in distress is on account of the recent death of her mother, following a year-long-or-so illness that had the daughter serving as the mother's caretaker in her New York City apartment. With the character still processing her grief, Burger opens the movie with a series of shots that will make up most of the story: Dynevor looking quite upset and walking from one metropolitan location to another, before taking a brief respite to stew in those emotions. In this sequence, Maya wanders to a nearby club, dances, picks up a guy for some meaningless sex, and perches herself on one of the apartment's windowsills—leaning maybe a bit too far forward to see if this is the end for her.

At the mother's funeral, Maya and her older sister Jess (Kersti Bryan) are surprised to see their long-absent father Sam (Rhys Ifans). He's there to try to make amends for leaving his family, while doing real estate work on the other side of the world, and while her sister isn't having or even hearing any of it, Maya believes he might be sincere.

It's enough to take Sam up on his offer to start working for him. The change of scenery—Cairo—and the pay—a thousand bucks a day—are pretty tempting beyond the potential father-daughter reconciliation.

Before the work or the personal talk can really start, though, Sam leaves a restaurant in the Egyptian capital where the two are eating. A minute or so later, Maya gets a phone call from him, ordering her to leave immediately with the computer tablet he left behind. The police arrive, looking for Sam, and the father tells his daughter that she can't trust anyone except him. Soon enough, another call comes, telling Maya that Sam is a hostage, that she has to get something from a safe-deposit in India, and that, if she doesn't bring the captors the item, they'll kill her father.

From there, the plot, from Burger and co-writer Olen Steinhauer's screenplay, amounts to a lot more walking at different paces for Maya—as she goes from one locale to another in Cario, New Delhi, and Seoul—and plenty of phone conversations with various unseen players and the occasional game of cat-and-mouse in between. The New Delhi scenes are the most active, to be sure, as Maya navigates a crowded market, trying to find the abductors' contact amidst the mass of shoppers, and has to flee from the cops yet again.

That puts her on the back of a motorbike in a harrowing sequence that has the driver swerving between cars, taking tight turns into cramped passageways, and racing ahead of police vehicles that come quite close to colliding with other cars. Considering the free-wheeling and seemingly improvised nature of the narrative, one wonders how much of this sequence was staged and how much was just shot amidst a routine commute in the city. The camera is so static that we marvel at the chaos, controlled or not, and so close to Dynevor's face during the chase that it's unmistakably her in every moment.

It's the undeniable highlight in a movie that, ultimately, feels primarily like an experiment in on-the-cheap (relatively speaking, of course, if only because of all the international travel) and on-the-fly filmmaking. It's a nifty concept with a few impressive results—not to mention an added layer of meta-level tension, since so many of its low-key spy games seem shot in a clandestine way. Inheritance, though, comes across as a concept without much or any depth to its characters, plotting, or, for that matter, anything else.

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