84 min | R | January 10, 2020 | Lionsgate
A family runs opioids through the hills of Appalachia. The dealing is killing the people who buy and the people who sell, and the Conleys cannot stop because dealing is all they have. Inherit the Viper wants to be a tragedy about the cycle and forgets to write the tragedy.
Kip Conley deals opioids in a hollowed-out corner of Appalachia. His sister Josie runs the money. His younger brother Boots is being pulled into the operation before he is old enough to understand what it costs. The film positions itself as a tragedy about the drug trade as a family inheritance. The pills move from the Conleys to addicts who die, and the deaths keep arriving. The thesis is that escape is impossible because the business is the only thing the family knows.
Josh Hartnett plays Kip with a tired stillness, a man who wants out and knows there is no door. His restraint reads as fatigue rather than depth. Margarita Levieva plays Josie as the hard center of the family, colder and more practical than her brother. Owen Teague plays Boots with the wide-eyed pliability of a kid being shaped into a criminal. Bruce Dern anchors the older generation as Clay Carter, and Chandler Riggs plays Cooper, the customer whose overdose opens the film. The actors commit, but the script hands them attitudes instead of characters.
Anthony Jerjen directs his first feature from a script by Andrew Crabtree. The cinematography drains color toward gray and brown until the Appalachian landscape becomes one continuous overcast. The visual scheme signals despair in the first frame and never modulates. The editing cuts between the Conleys and their victims to insist on consequence, but the connections stay schematic. The mournful score underlines every scene with the same low dread, and the redundancy flattens the drama instead of deepening it.
Inherit the Viper has the shape of a serious film about an American catastrophe. It has the gray light and the grim faces and the dead bodies. What it lacks is interior life. The characters announce their misery without ever surprising us, and the plot advances through genre beats borrowed from a dozen better crime films. The opioid crisis deserves drama that earns its sorrow. This one assumes the sorrow and skips the drama.