Mark Reviews Movies: INHERIT THE VIPER

Become a fan on Facebook Follow on Twitter

Review by Mark Dujsik | January 9, 2020

An ordinary life transformed into tremendous pain and tragic desperation is the start of Inherit the Viper. It's a brief but all-defining scene, featuring Josie Conley (Margarita Levieva), one of the heirs of a small-town criminal empire (relative to the size and scope of the actual location, to be clear), and one of her clients.

The client is a woman who took a factory job, because it paid and her family needed the money, and received a back injury for her hard work. She was prescribed pain medication, an opioid, of course, for reasons—of greed on the part of pharmaceutical companies, complicity on the part of medical practitioners, and inactivity on the part of the government—that should be known by now. The film is wise enough to assume our knowledge of this health crisis, because it has a more intimate story to tell about the consequences of this massive societal failure.

It has to do with addiction. The woman has become addicted to the medication, and with her prescription or the money to obtain the pills by legal means running out, she has turned to Josie. She and her family have been buying excess or stolen pills off the street, and in turn, they sell them to the pained, the addicted, and the desperate.

It's a legacy they've inherited from their late father, who went off to prison when the youngest Conley child was only 5 years old, never to return. Josie and her brother Kip (Josh Hartnett) know their father was a terrible man, abusive toward their mother, but the younger brother Boots (Owen Teague) wasn't old enough to know any of that. In Boots' eyes, his father was a hero. In the minds of the elder children, the father was just a bad man and, perhaps worse, a criminal stupid enough to be caught.

They'll be smarter, obviously. They have the plan, the connections, and the knowledge of their dad's screw-up to be a better, more profitable brand of criminal enterprise.

That's the basic setup of this story, written by Andrew Crabtree and directed by Anthony Jerjen—both making their feature debuts. As for the film's opening scene, which takes place in a bar where the Conleys are friendly with owner and former associate of their father Clay (Bruce Dern), it ends with the woman, having obtained her pills, going to the bar's bathroom to take them. Before heading home, Josie stops in the restroom herself and discovers the woman lying on the floor. She sees the woman, either unconscious or dead, and considers the sight. That's when she leaves the bathroom and the bar, without saying a word to anyone or calling an ambulance.

The arc of this narrative, then, is defined by this decision. It's about the three Conley children, each of whom has a different understanding of and reason to be involved in the illegal selling of opioids to the desperate. All of them see it as a business, and all of them, to one degree or another, have fallen into it.

Kip, played with a commendable combination of grit and sensitivity by Hartnett, is a military veteran. He returned home from combat with a considerable understanding of how terrible human beings can be to one another and at least some desire to be better than that. Josie, whose journey from apathetic to active cruelty is frighteningly conveyed by Levieva, has only known this place and this line of work. Based on the fact that Clay mentions that her client isn't the first dead body that has been found on the bathroom floor of his bar, she is in it for the long haul—consequences be damned.

Boots, a teenager, only sees the examples of his older siblings. Kip tells him about the horrors of the world and the potential to be better—himself living that example, as Kip is soon to be starting a family with his girlfriend Eve (Valorie Curry). From Josie, Boots has received the new car he has wanted for his birthday. Imagine yourself as a teenager, and guess which of the siblings Boots seems to admire more.

Crabtree's screenplay proceeds in a somewhat predictable way, as the family business comes under threat from corrupt police closing in, sellers raising their street prices, one upstart rival who thinks he can get the drop on the youngest and most naïve of the Conleys, and the husband (played by Brad William Henke) of the doomed woman from the opening scene looking for some kind of vengeance. These, though, aren't the point of the story.

Instead, the characters who make up the tight-knit Conley clan matter. Despite the material and assorted complications put into the play, the film isn't a thriller (There's a shootout at one point, but it's more of a desperate, defensive massacre). It's a character study, dark and gloomy (Nicholas Wiesnet's cinematography bathes just about everything in shadow), in which the three members of the Conley family find and show themselves through the ways in which they respond to each new problem that arises. We come to understand each one's decisions, and we also see how their interests are aligned (Keeping the family together is a constant goal, especially from the older siblings), even as each character sets off down a different moral path.

On the surface, Inherit the Viper is about a tangible kind of addiction. The darker heart of the film, though, is in its examination of the addictive qualities of power.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products