Shot guerilla-style in various urban locations with an iPhone and a small crew, Inheritance represents something of a return to director Neil Burger’s more experimental beginnings, particularly the faux-documentary approach of his feature debut Interview with the Assassin. Unfortunately, this would-be gritty espionage thriller has no more originality, depth, or thematic complexity than Burger’s biggest commercial success, the facile YA sci-fi adaptation Divergent, and it’s left oddly stranded between two opposing, mutually destructive sensibilities.
The film is centered on Maya (Phoebe Dynevor), a young woman whose sense of disaffection is partly mirrored by the vérité camera that tracks her impatiently throughout. After a brief opening sequence in which she engages in a number of “risky” activities—shoplifting a bottle of vodka, engaging in a dispassionate one-night stand, smoking a cig with her legs dangling out the window of her high-rise NYC apartment—Maya’s unconvincing emotional turmoil culminates in an unexpected reunion with her estranged father, Sam (Rhys Ifans), at her mother’s funeral. Announcing his intention to make amends after decades of neglect, the shady real estate broker invites her to join him on a business trip to Egypt, an offer to which she reluctantly agrees.
There’s barely enough time for the pair to have a heart-to-heart before Sam disappears abruptly from a restaurant in Cairo, as his network of money-laundering foreign businessmen is revealed to be even less legitimate than Maya had initially suspected. Despite the protestations of her more grounded sister, Jess (Kersti Bryan), back home, she soon embarks on an increasingly complex mission to rescue their father from his apparent kidnappers, navigating the Egyptian capital and globe-trotting to Delhi and Seoul while negotiating with corrupt authorities and politically motivated underworld figures, all of whom seem to have a claim on the mobile device Sam had in his possession and the sensitive information stored within it.
Gesturing at the faceless insidiousness of global capital and boasting a twisty plot that keeps Sam’s true affiliations and motives intriguingly vague, Inheritance has the seed of a solid genre movie in it somewhere. However, its bizarre mismatch of form and content mostly saps it of life, tamping down the tension and frequently suggesting an accidentally distributed proof of concept for a project that never managed to secure funding.
It’s unclear whether each of its far-flung settings was deliberately intended to feel interchangeable with the one prior, but it certainly feels like a considerable waste of resources. With neither conventional celluloid sheen nor any of the aesthetic brio that allows Michael Mann or Steven Soderbergh to pull off their comparable forays into digital, the film’s handheld, on-the-fly cinematography only exacerbates the sketchiness of its characters and milieu.
Despite the best efforts of Ifans to make his rote dialogue resonate, Inheritance never establishes much in the way of stakes, either in its conspiratorial developments or the central relationship between Maya and Sam. Dynevor, for her part, rarely conveys anything beyond a general uneasiness and agitation, as though her character is stealing passports and fleeing pursuers on motorbikes in order to chase up an unpaid invoice. It wouldn’t be a huge exaggeration to say that the closest Inheritance comes to thrills or verisimilitude are the moments where background members of the public, and occasionally Dynevor herself, briefly look directly into the camera, unintentionally jolting us out of our inertia.
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