In the presumptive Oscar frontrunner “The Brutalist,” director Brady Corbet uses the celebrated widescreen process VistaVision to imbue its character study with a sense of epic grandeur. Now, by coincidence, we have Neil Burger‘s “Inheritance,” which takes the globetrotting espionage narrative that might normally deploy such a slick visual style and instead shoots it guerrilla-style on an iPhone. Put it this way: if you were put off by the deliberately choppy and jittery visual approach of the Jason Bourne films, you will almost certainly have problems with this one. Even if you weren’t, the film is still a listless and overly familiar endeavor that feels like the semi-experimental work Steven Soderbergh might have done about six or seven years ago.
Phoebe Dynevor stars as Maya, a young woman who, as the story opens, is still reeling from the immediate aftermath of the death of her mother, for whom she served as primary caretaker for the last nine months. At the funeral, she and her sister, Jess (Kersti Bryan), are startled to see that their long-absent and estranged father, Sam (Rhys Ifans), has turned up for the services. Afterward, he tries to ingratiate himself with Maya, even going so far as to offer her a job with his real estate company in Cairo, where she will be asked to serve as a sort of guide/host for the incredibly wealthy people looking to do business with them. Jess thinks that the whole thing sounds sketchy and advises Maya to pass. But since she has nothing better going on in her life, the money is good ($1000 a day), and she does have a desire to finally develop a relationship with the father that she barely knows; she agrees, though she is still canny enough to demand a week’s pay upfront.
Although grateful for the chance to spend some time with Sam, some peculiarities begin to raise questions—the fact that he is traveling under a passport with a different name being a key one—and Maya soon begins to demand some answers. It turns out that Sam’s business at one point leaned less toward international real estate and hewed closer to international espionage, though he insists that those days are long past him. Perhaps not—one night at dinner, he leaves the table to answer a phone call and soon calls Maya to tell her to flee as quickly as possible and that he will meet up with her later. Before long, she gets another call informing her that Sam has been kidnapped and that she needs to go to India and retrieve something from a safe deposit box in exchange for him. She does this but when the agreed-upon exchange goes sideways, she decides to pursue matters for herself, heading out to Seoul in an effort to track down her father while avoiding being caught by either his captors or the Interpol agents who want the contents of the safe deposit box as well.
The visual style employed by Burger is certainly a choice, I suppose, and there are points where he deploys it in an interesting matter. The approach helps to underscore Maya’s emotional upheaval in the early scenes as we see her shoplifting vodka, clubbing, and picking up some random guy for anonymous sex. It also helps to liven up an extended mid-film chase sequence in which Maya hurtles through narrow streets and alleys while on the back of a speeding motorcycle. As the film goes on, however, the approach begins to feel more and more self-conscious; after a while, I found myself spending less time contemplating the intricacies of the narrative and more time wondering about what kind of permits and permissions, if any, were required for shooting in this manner.
That is mainly due to the fact that the script by Burger and Olen Steinhauer does not exactly break new ground regarding the espionage genre. There are a number of twists and turns, to be sure. Still, in almost every case, they can easily be guessed long before they are revealed, and as a result, viewers may always find themselves a couple of steps ahead of Maya at virtually every stage of the game. You always get the sense that you are watching a screenplay’s first draft that never got the fleshing-out that it clearly needed to make it stand out, either from a dramatic or emotional standpoint. Instead of the sense of tension or paranoia that you are meant to share with Maya as she hurtles from country to country, all you get is a relentless sense of deja vu throughout.
The best thing about “Inheritance” is the performance by Dynevor, the British actress who had breakout roles on television on “Bridgerton” and on the big screen in “Fair Play.” Although her character is ultimately little more than a pawn getting jerked around by the mechanics of the screenplay, she manages to infuse the role with enough depth and emotional underpinnings to keep you interested in her, if not necessarily the situation she is in, even while at the same time negotiating the presumable challenges brought on by the particular shooting style employed here. However, not even her efforts can ultimately make much out of “Inheritance,” a film made to look like a home movie and unfortunately proves to be about as exciting as one.
