Inheritance (2025) looks like both a conventional international spy thriller and an indie-movie travelogue. A young woman named Maya (Phoebe Dynevor) has just emerged from a grueling nine months caring for her ailing mother, who has just passed away. At the funeral, Maya’s estranged father Sam (Rhys Ifans) crawls out of the woodwork to pay his respects — but also, surprisingly, to offer Maya a job. An “international business man,” Sam wants Maya to join him in Egypt to glad-hand clients, but everything goes sideways when Sam is kidnapped, forcing Maya to make a decision: flee for her life, or try to save her father.
More interesting as a logistical exercise than a story, Inheritance has an appealing — if limiting — guerilla filmmaking style. It is shot almost entirely in hand-held, single-take scenes that follow the characters across the globe with minimal editing. On this score, it’s reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s recent Presence, but whereas that film has a very focused locale, Inheritance circumnavigates the globe: from New York to Egypt to India to South Korea and back again. Despite this broad scope, the cinematography is tight to the characters and the narrative approach is necessarily limited, which can be as monotonous as it is impressively efficient. Smartly, director Neil Burger brought in Olen Steinhauer to co-write the script; Steinhauer’s plotting fingerprints are all over it, adding depth to the scenario. Even so, while successful as a technical challenge, the film isn’t especially satisfying. Both Dynevor’s performance and the production ambience are a bit too one-note, a problem for which the location shooting — which includes a commendable motorcycle chase sequence in Mumbai — can’t quite compensate. Ultimately, Inheritance has aspects worth appreciating but doesn’t entirely come off.
