Running a business can be hazardous for a person's soul. That's the unsubtle moral of The Inheritance, a dour Danish drama that makes its point, then makes it again and again and again. An initially engaging but ultimately wearying combination of naturalistic acting, cinéma vérité camerawork, and broadly melodramatic plotting, the film stars The Celebration's Ulrich Thomsen as a yuppie restaurateur who takes over the family steel business after his father commits suicide. Thomsen's last stint with the steel business nearly killed him, but the pull of family and responsibility proves difficult to resist.
Spurred on by a cold, demanding mother with Lady Macbeth's ice-blooded, single-minded steeliness, Thomsen is forced to make one difficult decision after another, such as downsizing scores of workers who include his backstabbing weasel of a brother-in-law and the family's trusted long-term advisor. As The Inheritance progresses, Thomsen's father's suicide begins to look like a reasonable reaction to the pressures of an inhumanly demanding job. Thomsen's immersion in the Darwinian steel business places a terrible strain on his relationship with both his beautiful actress wife and his sister, and it threatens to consume his personality, transforming him into a bitter shell.
Thomsen delivers a fine performance as the increasingly ashen protagonist, but since The Inheritance never bothers to establish what kind of a man he was before he took over the business—beyond a happy guy who had lots of great sex with his hot wife—there's never much of a sense of what's lost in his descent into soullessness. The melodrama begins to derail in the home stretch, bottoming out with a sordid scene that emphasizes Thomsen's degradation and numbness, but rings false. The Inheritance deals with epic issues of responsibility, betrayal, and destiny, but since its characters are seldom developed beyond the level of abstractions, it stays closer to soap opera than Shakespeare.