Director – Alejandro Brugues, Screenplay – Chis LaMont & Joseph Russo, Producer – Paul Schiff, Photography – Vincent De Paula, Music – Mondo Boys, Visual Effects – Ghost VFX (Supervisor – Eric Gambini), Labyrinth Studio (Supervisor – Sachin Toraskar), Mr. X (Supervisor – David Jones) & NetFX Mumbai (Supervisor – Aniruddha Mukherkjee), Special Effects Supervisor – Steve Adams, Makeup Effects – Lindala Schminken FX. (Designer – Toby Lindala, Supervisor – Emerson Ziffle), Production Design – Eric Norlin. Production Company – Vertical.
Cast
Bob Gunton (Charles Abernathy), Briana Middleton (Hannah), Austin Stowell (Drew Abernathy), David Walton (C.J. Abernathy), Rachel Nichols (Madeline Abernathy), Peyton List (Kami Abernathy), Reese Alexander (Miles Hartman)
Plot
The four children of billionaire Charles Abernathy gather at the family mansion for his 75th birthday. Drew brings along with him his new wife Hannah even though she is not immediate family. Charles then announces that he knows that someone is going to kill him that night. He tells them that he expects all of them to stay in the house with him throughout the night and protect him. To this extent, he has had his will rewritten where his billions will be given away to charity instead of to them if he dies before dawn. The house is locked and barred and all of them imprisoned inside. As the children try to piece together what is going on, it appears that there is someone or something in there with them killing them one by one.
Argentinian-born director Alejandro Brugues made a splash on the horror/festival circuit a few years ago with the witty Cuban-set zombie film Juan of the Dead (2011). Brugues spent the next few years working in episodic television and contributing episodes to horror anthologies – the E is for Equilibrium segment of ABCs of Death 2 (2014), the The Thing in the Woods episode of the horror anthology Nightmare Cinema (2018) and the The Hammer of Zanzibar segment of Satanic Hispanics (2022). The Inheritance marks his second feature-length film.
The capsule premise for The Inheritance – “A billionaire on the eve of his 75th birthday invites his estranged children back home out of fear that tonight someone or something is going to kill him. He puts each of their inheritances on the line to make sure they’ll help” – left me intrigued. In actuality, what we get turns out to be less a fantastical horror film and more like an Agatha Christie-styled murder mystery set around the location of a big mansion and an unknown person running around killing people off. Stylistically and in terms of its location, the film kept reminding me of Ready or Not (2019).
Family patriarch Bob GuntonThe gathered children – (l to r) Peyton List, Rachel Nichols, David Walton, Austin Stowell and his wife Briana Middleton
I have enjoyed Alejandro Brugues’ other works – Juan of the Dead and his various episodes of horror anthologies – which is why I anticipated that this would emerge with a dark and funny sense of humour. The Inheritance could be considered Brugues’ first studio work with name actors as opposed to one made among the independents where the rest of his work lies. However, this seems to have forced some things onto Brugues. One of these is that The Inheritance has the look and feel of a slick commercial film. It feels anonymous in style and one that could have been made by any director.
There is the odd effect that impresses – I quite liked the one where a portrait comes to life and emerges from its frame to attack Rachel Nichols, while there is quite a cool looking demon that emerges towards the end – but most of the film slips into the instantly forgettable. The only real thing that the film hangs on is the question of who or what is killing people – the initial impression is that it is one of the party, but a limited victim count soon diminishes the odds of that, while the latter half of the show develops in increasingly more supernatural directions. However, when the revelation of what is going on comes, it proves to be a surprisingly uninteresting let-down.
