mommyplum Review of The Inheritance

The Inheritance (I) (2020)

Great bones of a story that had so much potential, but never got going

[4/10 · 25 January 2022]

Spoilers will follow. I saw this listed in my recommendeds on Amazon Prime video for free and since I tend to often like more indie, lower budget scary movies, I decided to watch. The premise starts off interestingly enough. A married Chicago couple, Peter and Sasha, find out Sasha is the sole heir to her recently deceased grandfather's surprisingly extensive holdings in Ukraine. It's hinted her grandfather wasn't a very demonstrative or effusive man with his family and neither Sasha nor her late mother were particularly close with him. Her grandmother, his wife, passed away more than 12 years prior. Sasha and Peter are off to Ukraine to sort through the legal issues of the estate, with Peter seemingly having an agenda that they should sell everything quick and return to the states. They're staying at an enormous and frankly gorgeous stately old house, still partially furnished, that they're told was once the residence of her grandparents in Kiev and that she has now inherited. Sasha discovers her grandfather was once a high-ranking, powerful and well connected Soviet officer more than 40 years before (Ukraine being under Soviet control then) who seemed to have amassed wealth and property (despite a communist state) due to what we can only surmise were nefarious connections and windfalls. The first night in the house, Sasha hears noises above them, even though there's no one else there. Screams, the sound of an argument, thuds, crying. Her husband hears none of it. In the morning he's brought round a jumpy looking local lawyer who wants her to immediately sign all papers selling every last bit of her inheritance to a buyer she never knew existed. When she balks, the lawyer leaves looking scared and her husband suddenly announces he's going out to "check on their options," or something to that effect. Only he doesn't return for days and keeps phoning her with enigmatic tales of being stranded somewhere and waiting for a taxi or bus. Here's one of my issues with the plot - Sasha is mad he's not back, but never specifically asks where he, in fact, is. Wouldn't that be your first question if you were her? In the meantime, alone, she decides to look into her family history, especially with the house. Everywhere she goes to find info, she gets menacing road blocks. I thought this meant something, but, ultimately it never really does (a bit more on that later). She does manage to find a woman living nearby who once worked at the house for her grandparents and talks to her on the phone. The woman tells her she always liked her grandmother, Olga, who was usually very sweet and quiet, but says her grandfather was a bit of a sadist to his wife. He enjoyed making her cook, clean and sew for him even though they had a house full of servants. He also like to hurt and humiliate her. The woman goes on to tell a shocked Sasha that the only time she heard her grandmother stand up for herself and get angry was when she discovered the new maid that was hired, Irina, was, in reality, her husband's mistress. The woman also tells Sasha that very suddenly the servants were all let go one day by her grandfather with no explanation, but when she went to inquire later after Olga, she was told by some of the grandfather's personal guards/henchman still guarding the house that they'd moved away. That night, with Peter still MIA, Sasha hears more ghostly noises and eventually by morning has found a hidden door that leads to what must have been the rooms for housemaids at one time. Her grandmother's name, Olga, is scratched into the floor of one of them. This leads Sasha to deduce her grandmother must have first locked up Irina in this room and then killed the mistress/maid in a fit of pent up rage and her grandfather covered it up through the help of his connections and left the country with his wife and toddler daughter for the states, maintaining his wealth abroad. No sooner has she leaped to this conclusion than Peter has reappeared and now drunkenly is strong arming her once again into selling up quick. She slaps him and storms out, heading to see the former caretaker in person. Through looking together in a family album, the caretaker shockingly reveals that the woman Sasha knew as her grandmother, was, in fact mistress/maid Irina and produces a photo of the real Olga. Now Sasha knows what must be the awful truth, that her grandfather killed the real Olga after beating her up and imprisoning her in Irina's room for a time, then had Irina assume her identity and beat a hasty exit with her and his child using all his corrupt connections to start over in America. She rushes back to the house only to get ambushed by Peter, who assaults her and reveals prior to all this he borrowed a bunch from people connected to a Ukrainian mobster, and if they don't sell everything to him immediately at a cut rate, with a bit of profit leftover for them, he's as good as dead. They begin to struggle, and then men who have been seeming to watch the house bust in, beat him senseless and basically disappear him, leaving her unscathed. I think we're supposed to deduce these men were not actually connected to her husband's shady dealings, but are, in fact, still the shadowy henchmen/guards (a couple generations later) who have been paid for by her grandfather's holdings all this time. Weirdly, we as viewers can sort of intuit this, but Sasha doesn't seem to, and also doesn't seem to care about her husband likely being hauled to his death, who did it, or what his outstanding debts to underworld characters might mean for her. She just dusts herself off and proceeds to have a brief goodbye encounter with the ghost of her murdered real grandmother. The next day she's packed and headed to the airport. Only 10 seconds later we see her walking back into the house. Why? Is she staying? Did she forget something? Did she actually leave, but is now back again? Are we to think no authorities in the US or Ukraine will ever wonder where her husband went? And why were the people in records and archives so aggressive towards her? They were literally telling her most of what she knew - about her grandfather owning the property, and no current generation more than 40 years removed could have been anyone in these bureaucracies who might have helped him forge documents for Irina by the looks of their ages. Why do the estate agent for the house and her husband hint that everyone in the neighborhood avoids the whole section of the street the house sits on? I mean, it's sat unoccupied but kept up at the grandfather's behest all this while and no one outside of the house knows of his crime. Too many plotholes really sink this and too little is actually spooky to make this really enjoyable, in the end.