Banjong Pisanthanakun’s latest film, Inherit, takes humanity’s desperate obsession with youth and beauty and stretches it to its most horrifying possible conclusion.
The story centres on the Manasvanich family, already embattled by a chemical leak at their factory allegedly causing birth defects in the surrounding local population.
The last thing this crisis-stricken family needs is an unexpected visit from a long-lost octogenarian relative arriving unannounced at their door.
But when Grandma Woranart appears, she is no frail elderly woman — she is, as the film puts it, a bombshell in eveningwear who makes everyone both horny and uncomfortable.
This seemingly twentysomething woman insists on being addressed as Grandma, hinting at some mysterious and deeply unsettling elixir of eternal youth she has clearly discovered.
When pressed on her secret — Botox, GLP-1s, chemical peels — she responds with a sultry smile, confirming all of the above without revealing the darker truth beneath.
The family’s teenage daughter Oui develops a particularly close bond with Grandma, lounging poolside and joining girlie shopping trips, only slightly perturbed by the violent deaths that follow in her wake.
It soon becomes clear that Grandma has sold her soul to an ageless centipede demon, setting off a frantic race to exorcise the evil before another vessel is claimed.
For Western audiences, part of Inherit’s considerable charm lies in watching a familiar demonic horror trope transplanted into an entirely different cultural setting with great skill.
Priests bearing crucifixes are replaced by robed monks, and icons of the Virgin Mary become statues of the Buddha, giving the genre a refreshing and visually distinctive new identity.
The film is brilliantly acted throughout, with Davika Hoorne delivering a wonderfully over-the-top and vampish performance as the seductive Grandma that anchors the entire production.
Director Banjong Pisanthanakun, known previously for The Medium and Shutter, brings exquisite visual flair to the screen, making Inherit as gorgeous to look at as it is unsettling.
For its first hour, the film demonstrates laudable restraint, slowly simmering and carefully rationing its jump scares and moments of gory body-horror to maximum effect.
A single flash of a centipede escaping from beneath a duvet proves a far more chilling sight than the CGI monsters that crowd the screen during the film’s noisier later passages.
As the net closes around Grandma and more of her true face is revealed, the tension unfortunately begins to dissipate rather than build towards a fully satisfying climax.
The introduction of an unlikely deus ex machina to resolve the final act feels deeply unsatisfying given the solid and confident narrative work that preceded it throughout.
Despite its stumbles in the closing stretch, Inherit remains a smart and scary satire of society’s obsession with flawless skin that will feel as relevant in Birmingham or Bristol as it will in Bangkok.