Though set in 1930s Austria, the forbidding rural landscape in Stefan Ruzowitzsky's The Inheritors could easily be mistaken for centuries earlier, and that's part of its bleak charm. Like the cursed family in the similar Cold Comfort Farm, the peasant laborers in The Inheritors have resigned themselves to a life of constant, joyless toil punctuated only by the occasional tragedy. All that changes, however, when their misanthropic boss dies and leaves them his entire estate, a will the other landowners honor as if it were written by Howard Hughes. The funniest scenes in The Inheritors find this ragtag collective ("The One-Seventh Farmers," to go by its original German title) equally puzzled and delighted by their newfound freedom and happiness, however short-lived. Ruzowitzsky draws the line between his heroic peasants and their cruel adversaries too boldly, but his Marxism is touched by moments of eccentric whimsy—a conversation relayed through a chorus of sniffles, a circus elephant making an unexpected climb up a hillside, the village hussy (Sophie Rois) brazenly belting out hymns from a landowner's church pew. The Inheritors unravels a bit toward the end, once it returns to a dark family secret that's telegraphed from the very beginning. But for the most part, Ruzowitzsky and his fine cast—especially Simon Schwarz as an illiterate-goof-turned-leader and Rois as the farm's self-appointed matriarch—have fashioned a potent, not to mention rare, proletariat comedy.