Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Emily Moss Wilson
Starring: Austin Highsmith Garces, Rachel Noll James, Wes Brown, Cynthia Gearey,
Chris Mulkey, Michelle Hurd
If there's one thing that can bring a family together it's a funeral.
Such occasions offer a chance to catch up with siblings, aunts, uncles and
cousins you may not have seen in quite some time, who in some cases have
returned from the other side of the world to unite in shared grief. But if
you've purposely avoided certain family members, their appearance in such
circumstances can often be unwanted, bringing with it baggage you've tried
to bury, memories you've tried to outrun.
That's the case for the characters at the centre of director Emily Moss Wilson's Inheritance. When her father, Doug (Chris Mulkey), suffers a fatal heart
attack at an otherwise jovial barbecue, expectant mother Lucy (Rachel Noll James) inherits the family home, which has been significantly devalued in
recent years. She's surprised to hear that her father's financial assets,
which amount to over a million dollars, have been left to her estranged
sister Paige (Austin Highsmith Garces), whom she hasn't seen in
over five years. To make things even messier, Lucy has been appointed
executor and instructed to pay her sister in monthly increments, but only
on the condition that Paige attends rehab and kicks her alcoholism.
After numerous unanswered phone calls and voicemails, Paige shows up just
in time for her father's memorial service. She puts on a chirpy front and
acts like all is well, but she secretly owes money to a figure named David
who bombards her with angry texts and phone calls. Believing she would be
able to collect her inherited money and disappear, Paige is none too happy
to hear about the conditions to which her late father has subjected her.
Refusing to enter rehab, Paige sticks around in the hope that she can
manipulate her sister into handing over the cash. Her presence leads to
escalating tensions, especially when her past history with Lucy's husband
Luke (Wes Brown) resurfaces.
A quick glance at Wilson's IMDB page tells you she's spent the past
decade helming numerous made for TV movies, mostly holiday themed, with
titles like Hometown Christmas, My Southern Family Christmas and Rescuing Christmas. Inheritance is clearly a passion project but it bears the hallmarks (no pun
intended) of an education in the school of made for TV filmmaking. And I
mean that as a compliment. It's easy to slag off those Hallmark and
Lifetime channel movies for how they essentially rehash the same handful
of storylines over and over, but they display an understanding of
formulaic storytelling that's becoming a lost art in Hollywood. It's an
under-rated place for a filmmaker to learn their trade, as close as we now
have to the old days of kicking off a career by working for Roger
Corman. Inheritance has the sort of plotline that wouldn't be out of place in a
Lifetime original, and it moves with the same well-honed storytelling pace
(some new revelation is dropped every 15 minutes or so, just at the point
where a commercial break would slot in if it had been made for TV), but
there's a depth to the characters that's absent from made for TV
fare.
The script is co-authored by leads James and Garces, and they've written
themselves the sort of meaty parts that aren't being offered all that
often to American actresses. Lucy and Paige might fit the tropes of the
sensible sister and her rebellious sibling, but in both their writing and
performances, James and Garces make these women three dimensional. Inheritance addresses how we're easily seduced by charismatic people like Paige
while taking the likes of Lucy for granted. James plays the latter like a
woman who feels she's been cheated, always left to hold the fort while
those around her have all the fun, but as the film progresses we learn,
via a combination of flashbacks (Allegra Sweeney, who plays the
teenage Paige, bears an uncanny resemblance to Garces) and angry
confrontations, that Paige isn't quite the stereotype her more sensible
sister believes her to be. Despite Paige's narcissism, Garces' layered
performance ensures we never quite view her as a pantomime villain, even
if that's how she seems to think of herself.
Each time it appears as though Inheritance is about to take a turn into melodrama, it pulls back and offers a
more nuanced take on the age-old drama of estranged siblings trashing out
their resentments. Inheritance tells its story with machine-tooled precision, but it's
recognisably human in its emotional messiness. Wilson, James and Garces
have left an impressive calling card with this zippy but sensitive tale of
familial strife.
Inheritance plays at the 2024
Vashon Island Film Festival on August 10th.
