Inheritance shoots its generic thriller through the invigorating lens of an iPhone

Neil Burger’s shot-on-an-iPhone globe-trotting thriller Inheritance begins on a New York City street. Guerrilla-style close-ups frame the face of despondent twenty-something Maya Welch (Phoebe Dynevor). EDM blares on the soundtrack. We follow Maya, elliptically, on a night of reckless behavior: shoplifting, clubbing, sex. Finally, she returns to an apartment where a large medical bed sits empty. She lights a cigarette with a candle from a Buddhist altar in the living room and climbs out the window to contemplate the street below. 

As we’ll soon learn, Maya has spent the last nine months taking care of her terminally ill mother. She has passed from grief to the “What now?” stage. An answer appears by way of her long-absent dad, Sam (Rhys Ifans, doing a softened Trump voice), whose presence at the memorial service is treated as an unwelcome surprise. He’s some kind of wealthy businessman, currently working in international real estate. He offers her an easy job escorting potential buyers from Egypt—a chance to make money and get her mind off her mother’s death, and maybe an opportunity for him to make some amends. “Let me be a father,” he says.

They set off for Cairo, where they meet Sam’s business partner, Khalil (Majd Eid), and go to visit the pyramids, recreating a family trip from Maya’s childhood. But something about this father-daughter bonding trip already seems amiss. Sam is traveling on a UAE passport under a different name, and his answers to Maya’s questions are evasive. After some pushing, he admits that, before getting into real estate, he was a broker and money-launderer for various international back channels—but not, he insists, a bad guy. (“I backed the Kurds in Syria!” he claims in his defense.) And before that, he worked for the State Department. Which is to say, he was a spy.

Working with real-world locations and a minimal crew, Burger directs all of this with a verisimilitude that recalls the mid-to-late-2000s era of indie and arthouse digital filmmaking; it’s tough for a viewer of a certain age to not feel a little nostalgic at the jump cuts, ragged blocking, sneaky handheld camerawork, and Dogme influences. Every other shot seems to either begin with or land on a close-up of Maya’s face. In Inheritance’s more engaging stretches, it provides a vicarious stylistic counterpoint to what is otherwise a conventional genre exercise. 

Said genre exercise kicks into gear with the disappearance of Sam, who seems to have been abducted by unhappy former clients. His captors tell Maya that she has two days to deliver some kind of MacGuffin or they will kill her father. With the help of Khalil (whom she doesn’t completely trust), Maya sets off a clandestine fetch quest that eventually takes her from Egypt to India and, after that, to South Korea, turning the film into a kind of phone-camera documentary about airports, busy streets, and grungy hotels, with occasional moments of intrigue—a skewed, low-budget take on the familiar, touristy pleasures of slicker, splashier spy films. 

The twists in Burger and Olen Steinhauer’s script are the kind that a seasoned viewer will be able to spot from a mile away, and the internal family drama can feel heavy-handed at times. But Burger—a Hollywood journeyman who’s done some hackwork but began his career with the 2002 conspiracy mock-doc Interview With The Assassin—keeps things moving with a vérité point-of-view that sometimes makes it feel like the camera is the one doing the spying. 

Director: Neil Burger
Writer: Neil Burger, Olen Steinhauer
Starring: Phoebe Dynevor, Rhys Ifans
Release Date: January 24, 2025