If you have ever wished to be so close to Phoebe Dynevor that you can practically smell her perfume, congratulations are in order because you're finally getting your wish, especially if there will be a 4DX option. You're being flown all over the world with Inheritance, in which you meet Maya (Dynevor), a young American woman who has just lost her mom whom she's been caring for the last few years, resulting in Maya letting off some steam as well. Tensions are high when her deadbeat dad Sam (Rhys Ifans) arrives at the funeral, clearly wanting something from her, which leads to Maya travelling abroad with him, but things shift from father-daughter time to dangerous events involving espionage when Sam is revealed to be in the spy business. After Sam gets kidnapped and Maya becomes a target, she must search for answers and solutions in Egypt, India and South Korea.
The general idea for the film is unsurprisingly not the hook here as you get your typical spy action thriller with conspiracies, double-crossing, bad blood and retrievable items that might or might not save a life. Instead, director and co-writer Neil Burger, and the cast and crew, are trying to shake things up more when it comes to form since there seemed to be an emphasis on guerrilla filmmaking, an extreme sense of realism and spontaneity when crafting scenes. This approach is both intriguing and admirable, and it creates a couple standout moments like one chase sequence in Delhi that felt appropriately chaotic and fresh, whereas all the different ingredients don't really fit together in the intended dish once the movie begins to reach its halfway point.
We start with great location work, which helps to make proceedings feel immersive and you do get pulled in immediately, but the photography (by Jackson Hunt) does become a real eyesore after a while (my initial impression was that the production may have used small commercial cameras, phones or GoPros; apparently only iPhones were used) as the film often looks outright bad, from compositions to camera movement and from zooming in on props to skin tones. Again, the construct is kind of cool, sure, but the footage that has been captured, and the quality regarding lenses and colour, are affected negatively by several terrible choices along the way.
Around the time that you begin to get frustrated with the style, you also begin to realise that the screenplay has rather limited appeal at its core. Burger and co-writer Olen Steinhauer struggle to find the same propulsion in their characters and themes that the guerrilla tactics offer, which then bleeds into the central performances, too. Dynevor certainly has a great face for intense closeups—and she does well with what seem like unrehearsed scenarios she's thrown into—but even she can't help but fall victim to lifeless dialogue, unsatisfying family drama and weird editing (by Nick Carew), which really highlights the reasons why good editing often erases the blank stares when actors don't really believe in the drama and finds gems in normal reaction shots so that we don't have to only watch a character yap their heart out.
However, when you do this sort of off-the-cuff shooting even when it's not necessarily required, the editing isn't there to do what it's supposed to do, whether that is uplifting the performances or magnifying the relationships between our characters. Furthermore, when you add Ifans' performance that isn't really fusing with the spontaneous style, you come to grips with the fact that you're neither believing the friction between Maya and Sam nor understanding why she's risking a lot for what seems to be a whole lot of nothing. As a result, it is hard to parse what Burger and Steinhauer are trying to achieve with this story aside from making a globetrotting spy film without looking like they're making a film.
One final move that the filmmakers have in their carry-on is music and composer Paul Leonard-Morgan is pretty much giving his all to compensate for awkward acting and plotting with his swirling, experimental electronic score, even succeeding here and there, but you can't help but feel like it's just too little, too late at that point. Overall, Inheritance is a respectable endeavour that you want to root for, but it is also a swing and a miss because of its dreariness, which is why you don't end up rooting for it.
Smileys: Locations
Frowneys: Cinematography, story
South Korea travel vlog idea: Do some Seoul-searching and find out that your dad is a prick.
2.5/5
Where to watch:
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