After nine months of taking care of her ailing/dying mother, Maya (Phoebe Dynevor, Fair Play, Bridgerton) has something of an emotional bender at the opening of director/co-writer Neil Burger’s Inheritance.
She goes to a club, gets drunk, sleeps with a stranger, and wakes up the next day barely able to contemplate her life without this burden on her. Her mother’s hospital bed is still in her living room, but aside from that, the worst is over. Her sister wasn’t much help, but she had a family of her own to deal with, so the responsibility fell to Maya. At her mother’s funeral, Maya is shocked to see her father (Rhys Ifans) show up; he left the family when she was quite young, and contact between them has been sporadic at best. But he seems intent on reconnecting with her, going so far as to offer her a job at his vaguely reputable international business firm.
Maya feels like his effort is legit, and she goes to work for him, soon ending up on a plane to Egypt. But as the trip continues Maya begins discovering things about her father that don’t add up: his passport is in a different name; every time he gets a call, he walks away from her; and eventually he confesses that in his younger days, he was a spy, often aligning himself with shady characters or outright criminals. As the true motivation for him approaching her becomes clearer, Maya wants to go home, and that’s when her father is kidnapped and the ransom is a digital hard drive with secrets and money attached to it.
As Maya attempts to retrieve this drive (she must go to India to do so), she also attempts to investigate what businesses her father was involved with and who might have kidnapped him. But in her quest, Maya ends up becoming a target and she must use her father’s skills and her own heightened intelligence to unravel multiple mysteries.
Co-written by Burger and Olen Steinhauer, Inheritance essentially rests on how engaging Dynevor is in the context of this very labyrinthian story, and thankfully she succeeds at doing a great deal of heavy lifting to make the plot make any kind of sense. She’s cynical when it comes to her father, even when he fully turns on the charm and convinces her that he wants to get to know her again. But Maya also isn’t afraid to ask tough questions and never hesitates to be the aggressor when necessary. The film has a couple of strong action sequences, including one where Maya is on the back of a scooter, driven by a guy who just really wants to help her (I loved the randomness of this character in that moment; it’s rare that good samaritans show up in movies like this).
Director Burger does a solid job of threading the many storylines into something mostly understandable ones, but there are so many mysterious characters whose allegiances we’re not sure of floating around this film that he’s not always successful. Still, Dynevor and Ifans play off each other perfectly, butting heads frequently but also knowing each other well enough that they can manipulate with ease. Inheritance has its flaws and moments of predictability, but there were enough surprises and entertaining twists along the way that I genuinely wanted to see where this thing landed.
And for the most part, it did not disappoint.
The film begins its theatrical run on Friday.
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