Within the first five minutes of “Inheritance,” Maya (Phoebe Dynevor) has stolen a bottle of tequila, gone home with a stranger from a rave and dangled her legs out his window while smoking. Then she attends her mother’s funeral, where her estranged father Sam (Rhys Ifans) shows up and offers her a mysterious “real estate job” in Egypt. This is all captured with a restless, roaming camera that follows her down the street as she pounds the New York City pavement, propelled by the giddiness and guilt of grief and a desire for annihilation.

“Inheritance,” directed by Neil Burger and written by Burger and Olen Steinhauer, immediately plunges us into Maya’s world, captured with a gritty, grungy lo-fi aesthetic. Soundtracked to electronic music, it immediately calls to mind turn-of-the-millennium experiments in digital filmmaking, before everyone started trying to make digital look like film. Following one woman on an urgent urban journey, it may feel narratively like “Run Lola Run,” but is stylistically more in line with the 2015 one-take German thriller “Victoria,” directed by Sebastian Schipper.

Burger and his cinematographer Jackson Hunt shot “Inheritance” with a small crew and camera, “stealing” shots and sequences on location in New York City and then Cairo, New Delhi and Seoul, South Korea, as Maya is swept into her father’s world of secrets and deceit, and has to fight her way to the surface with only her scrappy street smarts and innate sense of self-preservation.

Maya quickly learns that her father’s promised job prospect is not what it seems, and that his past includes working as a spy in Turkey as well as international money laundering. When he disappears from a Cairo restaurant in the middle of dinner, she receives a call he’s been kidnapped, and she has to retrieve the correct items in order to ensure his safety, sending her on an urgent errand to India, which then sends her spiraling to Seoul.

But Maya cottons to the international life of mystery; she has a wild hair, and as much as her father has his flaws, Sam sized her up and chose well when deciding which of his progeny might be able to help him out of a pickle with Interpol. The pleasure of “Inheritance” is watching Maya take to this lifestyle, revealing her competence and capabilities in eluding authorities and deducing clues. She reads people and situations well, a skill she already had, as we’ve seen from her frequent shoplifting, but she becomes more confident and action-oriented as the film progresses. Turns out this was perhaps her true inheritance all along.

The main plot of Sam’s kidnapping and the hard drive that Maya ends up with isn’t all that gripping; it’s the domestic mystery that drives the story, rooted in emotion and betrayal. Will Sam reveal his true nature? Will Maya learn to pull one over on him?

Made with a run-and-gun ethos that infuses the film with an edgy immediacy, “Inheritance” is Burger’s best film in years. This experiment with immersive thriller filmmaking is a far cry from his slick teen sci-fi epics like “Divergent” and “Voyagers” or heartwarming dramas like “The Upside.” With a ruthlessly pared-down approach and compelling performer in Dynevor, who carries the film effortlessly, “Inheritance” is a throwback thriller that harkens to the retro days of the Y2K era. And while its style eclipses its substance, it’s the style that makes this cinematic curio worth watching.

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‘INHERITANCE’

3 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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