Critic Reviews

Like a good thriller, Inheritance draws you in and takes you right into the middle of the action. Then when it’s all over, you’ll want to revisit it as soon as possible to pick up on all the little details and clues. It feels real, which adds to the intensity.

Simon Pegg occasionally fulfills the nightmarish potential of the film’s fairy-tale premise.

Inheritance might have benefited from its third act being a tad subtler, but I get the allure of throwing away nuance for splashy suspense.

Despite great performances from Lily Collins and Simon Pegg, Inheritance is weighed down by heavy exposition and its overly ambitious story.

The idea of a literal crypt of living family secrets has a movie-ready, over-the-top absurdity, but in this smoothed-over telling, there's no dramatic juice, no impact — just pieces on a chess board, waiting to be maneuvered.

The whole thing is a wild concept, hinging on the plausibility of every character's motivations, which are all a bit squishy.

Despite a few effective “gotcha!” moments and Pegg’s performance, the movie is too artificial and undercooked to work. Logic and consistency are often overlooked qualities in today’s cinema but when they’re ignored to this degree, their absence is noticed.

A movie with a don't-think-too-hard-about-this premise can work if it sustains its own logic. It doesn't have to hold together in our world, so long as we believe it will hold together in theirs. But Inheritance is the case of a film that's so full of holes, it was likely recut from an earlier version and not quite stitched back together. Still, it just qualifies as watchable due to its nutty premise, sumptuous settings, and a couple of dynamic confrontations.

Though Stein’s film doesn’t exactly work up to a big surprise, it does unveil some new twists in its final act that hint at better craftsmanship than what was initially on offer.

A thriller that wants to be more than that and stretches the bounds of plausibility to get there, Inheritance may have you squirming in your seat and shaking your head in equal measure.