Inheritance (2025) Movie Review: Phoebe Dynevor Struggles to Lift This Aimless, Clunky Espionage Drama

Right from the opening of Neil Burger’s Inheritance (2025), a generic quality clouds the circumstances. In the wake of loss, a young woman, who had been previously constrained by duty, flings herself through a bout of reckless disrepair. She goes through the beats of a wasted party girl, hooking up and hurling a stab at private happiness, a thing she has not experienced in a while.

Maya (Phoebe Dynevor) can barely cope in the shadow of her mother’s passing. Quickly we learn that she used to be the primary caretaker of her mother in her final few months. She wholly subsumed herself in the responsibility. Can she exceed this, and become someone with her individual personhood and affiliations in place? The film unfolds as a journey of finding her identity that has so long been buried under responsibilities and burdens. Looking after her mother scraped out every bit of energy she might have channeled inward at varied pursuits. Ambition took a backseat. She has no social life to speak of. Neither does a reflection into existing friendships surface. Maya is very much like a phantom being drifting through a life hollowed out.

So, when her father, Sam (Rhys Ifans), gets back in touch at the funeral, Maya is faced with a sudden reckoning. He offers her to join him as a real estate agent. Maya’s sister, Jess, is miffed and urges her to stay away from whichever proposal he makes. He’s been away for so long. How can Maya just randomly decide to trust him and jump in? Jess rails.

But Maya is stubborn. She wants to travel the world which the job will provide. Guilt cannot be an option. She has done her task with her mother. Nothing now can rein her in. There’s a spurt of confidence and desire she experiences. It gives her a re-alignment of interest and potentiality in how she can fashion her life, and extract advantage. There’s a directionality she can summon, imagine her life as one teeming with possibility.

Early in the journey, she senses shadiness about Sam. Why does he have a passport with UAE citizenship? Maya does have her uncertainties. But she shuffles them aside and plunges anyway into her father’s increasingly alarming designs. He’s trouble and she has an inkling of it. Yet she’s irresistibly drawn into the murky depths. When he’s suddenly kidnapped, Maya is confronted with yet another responsibility of rescue.

Maya is cautioned by her sister to remove herself entirely from the situation. However, she feels beholden to her father. In her efforts to do her father’s bidding lies a yearning for a parental figure now that her mother is gone. She’s quietly desperate for it. The mission takes her on a globe-trotting tour, ranging from Egypt to Delhi and finally Seoul. A chunk of the events takes place, especially in India, a decision that critically amplifies the several problems with the screenplay which Burger has co-written with Olen Steinhauer.

Inheritance dabbles in espionage. I say dabble with generous leeway, given the film has such a slipshod, sketchy understanding of highly trained intelligence operatives who are conveniently left backfooted by someone as new to the field of disguise and hiding as Maya. How much can a person’s inherent smartness stand them in good stead? Frantic chases litter the film. None, however, accrues a thrust of urgency. The muddled narrative ascribes secrecy to a hard drive which everyone is hankering after. Interpol leaps into the mix. While Maya seeks to unravel layers of her father’s secret identity, she has to simultaneously think on her feet in determining threats within myriad situations. It’s a compulsion she takes on herself, against her sister’s exhortations. What does Maya owe to her father, who has been absent for so long, to stake her own life as well?

The frenetic pace of the film struggles to conceal its blatant mess of underdeveloped characters, plotting that’s more ridiculously contrived than taut and skillful. Exacerbating the blandness on display, the camerawork assumes a whizzing energy yet cannot expunge a colorless gaze in the Delhi portions. Predictability saddles the rapidly unfolding plot. Everything looks mysterious. The film harps on this. But it also feels vague and purposeless. Inheritance comes off as lacking in any personality or driving character, a jumble of chaotic events stitched together sans solid character growth.