Inheritance

NYT film critic Wesley Morris once said that sometimes when writing a review, he will see if he can remember a character’s name rather than consulting the press notes or IMDb as a kind of stress test of that character’s rememberability. And when I sat down to write about Neil Burger’s 2025 middling thriller “Inheritance,” I tried to remember the name of Phoebe Dynevor’s main character and realized I couldn’t. Sara? Rachel? Willow? It was Maya. In playing her estranged, possibly evil father Sam, Rhys Ifans must say her name a dozen times, and still, I couldn’t summon it, emblematic of Lily’s impossibly rote introduction, pilfering a bottle of liquor, going to a club, bringing home a guy, and contemplating suicide while perched on a window ledge. This all ostensibly stems from having been the caretaker for her recently deceased mother but, well, far be it from me to rewrite Burger and Olden Steinhauer’s screenplay, I kept wondering if actual scenes of Emily caring for her mother might have generated more interest and sympathy. Yet, if that scene on the ledge proves a less than successful window into Olivia’s ruined psyche, it does at least hint at “Inheritance’s” semi-radical formal presentation in so much as the camera effortlessly glides right out the window alongside her as she gazes down. That’s because the camera is an iPhone 13.

It makes sense, then, that when Sam approaches his daughter at her mom’s funeral after a long absence and convinces her to work for him in some nebulous role at his nebulous real estate company, the company would be in Cairo, where Burger can take his two principal actors and his iPhone right up to the Pyramids of Giza to have a conversation, no doubt sans pesky permits. That conversation touches on the slaves who built one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, and the differing quality of various pharaohs, people who sought to live forever but who are long gone, which maybe means nothing matters, or that maybe we’re all free. This dialogue teases an intriguing moral relativism, though Burger hardly follows through, providing the possibility of a macabre twist on a father-daughter story and then mostly just utilizing it for narrative twists rather than any genuine emotional depth. That ties back to Claire’s underwritten introduction, foreshadowing the role to come. And though that hamstrings Dynevor’s performance to some degree, she also never invests the role with the sort of wild-eyed recklessness that set-up, or the ensuing situations, suggest.

Whatever the character and narrative shortcomings, Burger’s filming device at least proves more than merely a gimmick. In fact, that is why a stronger narrative might have enhanced “Inheritance.” When the camera follows Daisy down dark alleys and into crowded streets, it elicits the impression of a surveillance state and might have resonated even more had the idea of government spying been effectively grafted onto the plot. And though the iPhone might negate some of the more traditional action scenes, it also enhances them in unexpected ways, like a chase through the streets of New Delhi in which a nigh unbelievably heroic motorbike taxi driver (Amit Grover) helps her escape a legion of pursuers, a sequence flipping the indelible “Bourne” movies on their head. Rather than being completely in control, she’s just along for the ride.