It may help to understand how “Inheritance” was shot before seeing filmmaker Neil Burger’s latest effort.

The spy thriller’s vaguely impressionistic feel is due to the desire of Burger — whose movies include “The Illusionist” (2006), “Limitless” (2011), “Divergent” (2014) and 2023’s disappointing “The Marsh King’s Daughter” — for the production to go unnoticed on location in population centers around the globe including New Delhi, Seoul and Cairo.

A tiny crew. Small cameras. No lights. No boom mics.

No permission to shoot.

Burger’s approach to “Inheritance” — in theaters this week — also involved star Phoebe Dynevor staying in character as Maya. Early in the film, after the death of her mother, Maya drinks from a bottle of tequila on the street in New York City and later swipes a pair of sunglasses from a shop at an airport. (In his director’s statement, Burger says he intervened when police officers questioned Dynevor about the public drinking and that the crew later subtly returned the sunglasses without the store’s staff ever being the wiser.)

If only it were as interesting to watch “Inheritance” as it is to read about it.

Those two activities aren’t all that far apart, to be fair, the performance of “Bridgerton” alum Dynevor and the intimate nature of the film contributing to a reasonably engaging if not engrossing cinematic experience.

After a bit of indulgent behavior involving more than the tequila — which, yes, she’d stolen — Maya goes to her mother’s funeral, where her sister, Jess (Kersti Bryan), prods her to change her mind about saying a few words about the woman who raised them, a woman Maya had been caring for over the last several months.

“I’d just say (expletive) too many times,” Maya says.

“She wouldn’t care,” Jess says.

Moments later, they are shocked by the appearance of their absentee father, Sam (Rhys Ifans).

While Jess remains wary of him, Maya soon takes him up on the offer of a job, supposedly in the lucrative world of New York real estate. Strangely, though, she first will need to travel with him to Cairo, and during the plane ride there, she finds a passport in his possession bearing a false name.

Sam is a smooth talker, and he works to assure Maya that any unsavory business dealings are behind him — which is less convincing once he leaves her at a restaurant after getting a call warning him that authorities are on their way there.

Grab his iPad and get out of there, he soon instructs her by phone, and he’ll meet her at a nearby location.

Only he doesn’t, with Maya now being faced with retrieving something supposedly very valuable he was set to fetch and deliver to some extremely dangerous people if she doesn’t want Daddy to be killed. He implores her to do what’s asked of her, and she sets about accomplishing her new mission.

As Maya follows a trail that takes her from Egypt to India and then to South Korea, she has reason to wonder whether Sam was ever really in danger.

The spy-with-family-baggage narrative conjures thoughts of the initially addictive TV series “Alias,” although the latter was much slicker and Maya doesn’t possess the espionage training of Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow — or her talent for butt-kicking. Still, Maya holds her own, adapting on the spy fly in a believable enough way.

As Maya, Dynevor, who starred in the 2023 thriller “Fair Play,” strikes a nice balance between being brave and frightened. The character encounters a handful of strangers — a cafe employee who hits on her, a woman who sits across from her on a train, to name two — and engages with them while wearing just the right amount of worry on her face.

Given how terrific he is on HBO’s “House of the Dragon” as the smart, scheming Otto Hightower, we wish “Inheritance” offered more of Ifans, whose credits also include 2023’s “Nyad.” He’s certainly not as compelling as he is on “Dragon,” but Ifans adds a spark to the proceedings whenever Sam reappears.

Burger co-wrote “Inheritance” with Olen Steinhauer, a spy novelist and creator of the TV series “Berlin Station,” and the pair works in myriad hallmarks of espionage tales — the train ride, an escape in a crowded area, red herrings — but in this fresh way enabled by Burger’s direction.

But while the film comes off as intimate and claustrophobic in a way that adds to the tension, it also may have benefited from a relatively big set piece not available due to the aforementioned constraints. Even an exploding car may have gone a long way.

Eventually, Maya reaches a more honest place in her relationship with her father, and “Inheritance” ultimately leaves us satisfied, thanks in part to a low-key ending that, while relatively easy to predict, fits in nicely with what’s come before it.

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‘INHERITANCE’

2.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for language and some sexual content/nudity)

Running time: 1:41

How to watch: In theaters Jan. 24

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