Inheritance (2020)

The Monroe family has money, power, a Senate seat in the bloodline, and a bunker. When patriarch Archer dies, his daughter Lauren, a Manhattan district attorney, inherits a key and a directive, and what she finds chained underground is a man holding thirty years of the family's confessions in his memory. It is a premise with genuine pulp in it. The execution is another matter. Vaughn Stein directs the whole thing as though the audience might leave if the volume dropped, and the film waits so long to enjoy its own absurdity that the absurdity sours.

Lauren drives the investigation, and her mother Catherine ends the film by shooting the man who raped her three decades earlier. That is a revenge arc for two women, delivered without a single speech about it, which keeps the picture's ideological temperature low. The cast is overwhelmingly white, with Marque Richardson and Michael Beach in supporting turns the script never asks to mean anything about race. The Monroes bribe officials, keep mistresses, hide bodies, and park money offshore, so a soft indictment of dynastic privilege runs beneath the plot. It never sharpens into a thesis about class.

The rest of the ledger is bare. No queer characters, no climate anxiety, no body politics, no neurodivergent figures, no rewritten history. The film is far too busy being a twist machine to lecture anyone, which is its one genuine virtue. A sermon would at least have been a choice. Instead we get a rich family rotting behind a locked door, a plot that squanders it, and fifty-six critics who declined the inheritance.