The Inheritance

In what could have been an interesting and atmospheric horror movie, fell apart due to the truly bad acting. I mean it's really, really bad. Not even "funny" bad just annoyingly bad.

The storyline is decent (but nothing new), camerawork is ok (not great), the setting is interesting and there is some moderate suspense. Some cheap surprises you can see a mile away and, again, nothing fresh.

Overall a pretty bad movie, mostly due to the acting. Strong actors could have saved this movie from itself.

I only gave it two stars because the mansion setting was so atmospheric.

Everything else was execrable. The dialogue was appalling and there were so many non- sequiturs I stopped paying attention.

The money spent making this film was utterly wasted.

Started off really well and I do like movies set in eastern europe, it gives them a dark and mysterious quality ever since Hostel came to the forefront but unfortunately although the film has some good atmosphere it lacks any scares and so many questions unanswered...like... who were the men outside? Why were they guarding the house? And who wanted to buy it? And the ending...what the heck was that all about? Even more laughable is the need to insert an extra scene mid or end credits but in this case for no apparent reason whatsoever.

I am afraid the acting was also pretty lame especially the boyfriend although most of the Russian actors beat the main ones into a cocked hat.

If you are going to write a horror movie then at least make it intelligible with a few frights or small scares.

Could have been good but like most low budget horror these days it just has no idea what it wants to be or how to accomplish it!

Right from the start this film seems to go out of its way to be antagonistic in as many different directions at once; starting with yelling and screaming, then with a quintessential upper class "Ugly American" couple, Sasha and Peter, making asses of themselves to their driver in Kyiv and antagonizing him for not speaking English.

They then proceed into an apartment building inherited from Sasha's grandmother. No idea why they're basically moving into the place that has been supposedly uninhabited for years, possibly decades. Peter then brings in their lawyer Roman, a guy who absolutely looks, sounds, and dresses like a human trafficker, presenting Sasha with a bunch of paperwork all in Russian that she can't read and is being pushed into signing so she can acquire the building.

Sensibly, she refuses to sign for now, asking for a translated copy of the papers. For some reason this becomes a major hassle that requires Peter to leave for days at a time, leaving Sasha to roam the apartment building hearing shouting and thumping and screaming each night. All the while there are a bunch of nondescript men dressed like Russian mobsters standing outside the house all hours of the day every day doing nothing.

Virtually nothing happens for huge portions of the film save for the constant noises and musical stings that lead up to nothing. There's no jump scares, not even any slow burning or creepy moments. Sasha is just wandering around the apartment, hearing noises, and that's it.

At one point she finds a book that supposedly belonged to her grandmother, and she starts piecing together a story of what actually happened with her grandparents and their servant girl before they moved to America. Along the way, everyone she is encountering is almost cartoonishly menacing, devious, or out-right threatening her and she seems completely unfazed by any of it.

At one point the greasy leather-jacket wearing lawyer Roman basically threatens her to sign it, saying something like "you're going to find out sooner or later" what's going on in the place, and when she latches onto that he's like "relax, it's nothing". Multiple characters basically say this or something similar to it to her at various times, and she is completely blissfully unfazed by any of it.

About the only rational and reasonable thing she does is refuse to sign when Roman and Peter act cartoonishly devious and suspicious around her, although there is no reason for her not to sign it. There's no reason for her to even be there in Ukraine, completely alone most of the time, not able to speak Ukrainian or Russian, and wandering around with menacing looking Ukrainians glaring at her in multiple locations while she just wanders around aimlessly.

So much of the film is just this that by the time anything actually starts to progress with the main plot, I had gotten so bored I tuned out what was happening. The ending was long overdue despite making absolutely no sense.

...the humans? Awful. Except for Sasha. Maybe it wasn't their fault, as the script was nonsensical. Or maybe it was just translated poorly? I don't know.

Other than Sasha, the characters were unlikable, wooden, almost robot like.

The secondary characters were bizarre, rude, or lazy.

The house, though, was gorgeous. Whoever filmed it did a nice job.

It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't very good either.