Neil Burger is one of those journeyman filmmakers who has done a little bit of everything fairly well. He’s gone the experimental route with his breakthrough mockumentary Interview with the Assassin, done some hard-hitting indie drama with The Lucky Ones (an admitted personal favorite of mine), and delved into modestly successful studio stuff with Limitless and Divergent. His latest, a vérité-style shot-on-an-IPhone espionage thriller Inheritance is like an amalgamation of all his sensibilities. The combination doesn’t always gel cohesively, but the propulsiveness and stylistic flourishes are undeniable and a nice change of pace from your generic spy thrillers.
Conceived during the pandemic at a time when most filmmakers were looking inward and making movies about isolation, Inheritance instead charts a globe-trotting course, shot guerrilla style using minimal crew in real-world locations with real-world variables. The story begins in New York City where we’re introduced to Maya Welch, played by Fair Play‘s Phoebe Dynevor. The camera follows her aggressively as she engages in a risky night of EDM partying, recklessly random sex, and shoplifting before coming home to an ominously empty apartment. We learn that she’s been taking care of her terminally ill mother, a peace-loving Buddhist, for months. And now that she’s gone, Maya is adrift with what the future holds.
An answer comes at a surprising place; her mother’s funeral. Rhys Ifans plays Maya’s estranged father, Sam, who has arrived quite out of nowhere. With a soothing, fatherly voice he offers Maya something to do to take her mind off of things. He’s some kind of wealthy international businessman and could use Maya’s help escorting some clients in Egypt. “Let me be a father”, he says soothingly, but his answers to her questions are evasive. But he’s the only parent she has left, and while Maya’s sister questions this decision, she sets off with him to Cairo. And at first, it all seems fine. They visit the pyramids, reminisce over the past and all seems right. However, it isn’t long before Maya finds out that her father’s shady business dealings are much darker than she suspected, an his past working for some pretty bad people is even murkier. When he vanishes from their Cairo dinner engagement with dire warnings for her to flee, it all comes crumbling down.
Inheritance follows Maya as she becomes engaged in an international conspiracy that her father is mixed up in, and that only she can rescue him from. There’s even a MacGuffin, a mobile device with top secret info, that has corrupt political figures and deadly underworld elements tracking Maya’s every move in order to get their hands on it. Hopping from Cairo to Delhi to Seoul, Maya is forced to evaluate the kind of person she wants to be while navigating busy streets, airports, dingy hotels, and back alleys, looking like a documentary about traveling the world on a budget.
To be fair, Burger isn’t doing anything particularly novel with his handheld, seat-of-the-pants cinematography. We’ve seen others, like Sean Baker and Steven Soderbergh, do similar for years. But Inheritance does manage to have an added element of dangerous spontaneity to it that keeps us on our toes. Burger is shooting in some very busy, treacherous locations and Dynevor just has to kind of go with the flow of her surroundings. So when we see her steal an item from a market later on in the movie (something she was instructed to do, but was not given permission to do by the shop owner) and you see that flash of worry on her face, just for a moment, you can really feel it. The film is full of energizing moments like this.
What doesn’t really click is the central relationship between Maya and Sam. The dialogue between them is wooden and overdone, and the internal family dynamics are unconvincing. The plotted twists are easy to spot, in contrast to the unforeseeable tone that Burger was looking to establish. Inheritance has the technical gravitas to be so much more than it is, which is a solidly entertaining spy film that occasionally has you feeling like you’re right there in the action.
IFC Films releases Inheritance in theaters on January 24th.
