Director: Neil Burger
Writers: Neil Burger, Olen Steinhauer
Stars: Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans, Ciara Baxendale
Synopsis: When Maya learns her father Sam was once a spy, she suddenly finds herself at the center of an international conspiracy.
A spy film or a film in which someone is thrust into a situation they don’t understand is meant to be exciting. It’s meant to evoke the fear of the unknown. It’s meant to give a sense that we can’t trust anyone or anything we see. It’s meant to do more and be more than whatever Inheritance is or does.
The script is a very tough sell. Writers Neil Burger and Olen Steinhauer attempt to get us on board with the flimsiest plot imaginable with the most frail of character motivations. Ostensibly, Inheritance is about grief and moving on from said grief, but the lengths the characters go between exploring that theme in a meaningful way are too few and far between. This lack of strong plot makes Maya’s (Phoebe Dynevor) catharsis at the end completely fall flat. We never know who she is beyond a few small hints that never interconnect because the spy plot moves forward at a glacial pace.
It doesn’t help that, as a director, Burger has seemingly instructed his actors to deliver their lines as stiffly as possible. We’re meant to believe that Sam (Rhys Ifans) and Maya are father and daughter, but their relationship plays more like distant relatives or old acquaintances. It’s true that they’re estranged and the way that Sam left is contentious, but to believe the lengths Maya is going for Sam, there has to be something more meaningful in how they speak with one another. It’s also a poor choice on Burger’s part to not have just let the two actors use their native accents. They spend seconds in New York City compared to the other international destinations and it is absolutely believable that they could both be Brits. Especially because Ifans’ American accent in this film is cacophonous to the ear.
Though it’s hard to listen to Ifans, it’s even more difficult to understand why Burger and cinematographer Jackson Hunt chose to shoot the film like they did. The camera is almost always tight on the human subjects, which could be a good technique if it meant something in terms of the grander narrative. Except this tight focus isn’t employed for a deeper meaning and is paired with an irritating constantly moving camera. When two people are speaking there isn’t a cut from one to the other, the camera is turned. When a person is looking at something on their device there isn’t a cut to a close up, there’s a swoop and push in from the camera. It’s a strange kinetic device and could have worked if there was more action in the film.
The best scene of the film is an excellent car chase through the streets of Delhi. This scene shows what the rest of the film could have been like had it been written with more of the genre elements in mind. Hunt’s close ups work so well because while the camera focuses on Maya’s terrified face as she holds tight to her motorcycle taxi driver’s waist, we see her pursuers in the background. The complicated nature of the foreground and background working in such tandem is actually breathtaking. It makes you wonder if the writers tried to build a narrative out of this scene alone because the rest of the film comes nowhere near matching its energy.
There is another excellently shot scene when Sam is talking to Maya on the phone and she’s across the street watching him lie to her in real time. The entire time the camera is on Sam, we can see Maya in the background. It adds some power to what the two of them are getting at, but the stilted dialogue ruins the ingenuity of the camera work.
If Inheritance fails, it’s because it attempts to elevate the spy thriller without really understanding it. It tries to make the film about the journey and the journey of a spy is interesting only if they’re getting actively chased. Inheritance then just becomes a sad young woman riding a lot of different transportation trying to save the life of a man she barely knows for reasons we and she barely understand. Inheritance may have been worth it if it could have had more scenes like the Delhi chase. Sadly, the film just exists as a lot of close up footage of an actress’s face as she moves through city streets, train stations and airports pretending there is a larger meaning or motivation to her actions.
