Birthright | OBSCURAE at TriBeCa

It’s an uncomfortable feeling to not measure up to your parents, right? Many in the western world are living in the gruel of their generational expectation and it’s impossible to live up to, what with the reality we've been left with by boomers, their choices, capitalist highs that have since deflated. There comes this moment in adulthood where you feel that you're supposed to have it all figured out by now—a good job, a big house, a pair of kids—but find it’s not at all certain, and that everyone is annoyed at you for fitting in so badly at the grown ups table. Zoe Pepper’s Birthright takes that feeling, that kind of gangly mid-adult puberty, and magnifies it to feature length, and it's every bit as compelling, and queasily funny, as it sounds.

Without a place to stay or job to tide him over, middling 30-something Cory (Travis Jeffery) and his pregnant wife Jasmine (Maria Angelico) grovel with his parents (Linda Cropper and a terrifying Michael Hurst, leagues away from his most recognizable work as Iolaus in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) to let them move in, at least till they can get back on their feet. But as their stay extends further and longer so too do their tensions rise, and the household’s hierarchy destabilizes as Cory is driven to dangerous, desperate measures to prove his worth. 

Every adult’s worst fear is here charged with electricity, and Pepper takes it to its realistic extreme with relish and spite, without ever going too cartoonish about it. This is a remarkably effective bottle thriller that's all edge and peel in the way indie filmmaking is uniquely suited towards. The Australian director fills the screen with the conveniences of a suburban life yet none of the comforts we associate with it—and it's frightening seeing the disconnect play out with Pepper’s players, all at their a-game unease, the audience trapped by the single location like the cast is by social disappointment, of getting old, of not hacking it in adult life.

Birthright is tantamount to a horror film. Scarier than some that I've seen recently. It's funny, in its own way, but tonally anxious—in scenes where Cory’s parents Richard and Lyn scurry in the dark of their own home like thieves, where misunderstandings flare like firecrackers, or where the score undulates in normal situations with pressure enough to strike a heart with a spike. The film deals with a feeling that the human race feels viscerally, will feel inexorably. One absolutely demented scene, about a red leather jacket and bad choices, at the film’s midpoint portends it: the terror of inheritance, and the vigorous transfer when one generation succeeds another. 

The couples at the center of Pepper’s film face expressions of the same fear: they resent being thrown out by an inhospitable system where everyone said it'd work out, and so they retreat to symbols of safety away from the chaos that the other couple presents. Birthright is generational trauma having a hissy fit, and by its end it turns into a mythic power struggle you can't take your eyes off of. It's unsettling, unhinged, and a little bit audacious. But more than anything, it's a film that'll haunt your life choices for years, and one you'll remember for longer.