On May 2, 2024, the action-packed thriller “The Successor” (The Successor / Le Successeur) from the French director Xavier Legrand will be released in Ukrainian theaters.
The plot centers on a young and successful fashion designer Elias, whose life changes dramatically after the news of his father’s death. Returning to his native Quebec, where he spent his childhood, turns out for the hero not just painful memories, but a real nightmare and a series of shocking discoveries. Hiding terrible family secrets, a man enters into a dangerous game, the stakes of which will be very high. This dark quest pulls you in and doesn’t let go until the very end, keeping viewers in constant suspense.
UNIAN, together with the film company Arthouse Traffic, decided to tell why viewers might like “The Heir” and what to look for when watching it.
One of the brightest young French directors
Xavier Legrand’s talent has already been noted at the world level. His debut short film “Before Losing Everything” was nominated for an Oscar and received a Cesar award (one of the most important film awards after the golden statuette from the American Film Academy).
His feature debut, the poignant drama “Custody” about a family destroyed by domestic violence, became an international sensation and earned the author of the “Silver Lion” at the Venice Film Festival for best director, and also received four Cesar awards.
In 2018, the respected magazine Variety included Legrand in its list of “10 Directors to Watch.”
Star creative team
“Succession” producer Sylvain Corbeil has previously collaborated with Xavier Dolan (“Mother,” “It’s Just the End of the World”), and editor Yorgos Lamprinos has in his portfolio the Oscar-winning “The Father” with Anthony Hopkins. At the same time, production designer Sylvain Lemaitre is known for Fragments of a Woman with Vanessa Kirby.
In short, the creator of the film has assembled behind the scenes a truly reputable team of professionals with a track record of working with cult directors and recognized masterpieces.
Premiere at a top film festival
“The Heir” debuted on the world film stage in September 2023 at the San Sebastian International Film Festival. This is a large-scale class A film festival, one of the most influential film forums in Europe. Getting into the main competition in San Sebastian is a sign of quality for many films. Among the winners of the festival over the years have been such outstanding directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Terrence Malick, Francois Ozon and Pedro Almodóvar.
Genre experiments and mythological parallels
One of the most interesting things about The Heir is the boldness with which Xavier Legrand mixes genres. The film begins as a psychological drama about fashion designer Ellias, who returns from the glitzy world of Parisian fashion to a traumatic past in provincial Quebec. But suddenly the film turns into a tense thriller in the spirit of Alfred Hitchcock. At the same time, Legrand avoids genre clichés, instead filling the plot with philosophical content and allusions to ancient Greek tragedies.
In an interview, the director admitted that he draws parallels between Elias and Icarus from ancient Greek myths. For the hero, a fashion design career is a flight to the Sun, a challenge to fate. And the forced return to his roots becomes for him a fall from heaven, like for Icarus. And in general, the story of Ellias is full of fate and resembles ancient tragedies.
Such genre and semantic experiments make “The Heir” equally interesting for arthouse connoisseurs and fans of tense thrillers.
A movie that makes you think and talk about important things
“The Heir” is not just a masterfully made genre film, but also a film that raises truly important and painful topics. Xavier Legrand continues the conversation about violence and toxic masculinity that he began in his previous acclaimed work, “Custody.” If there the director explored the topic of domestic violence, now his focus shifts to the destructive influence of patriarchal culture as a whole. Moreover, not only women and children suffer from this, but also men themselves, who find themselves trapped in roles and behavior patterns imposed by society.
Legrand poses difficult questions to the audience and the characters. Is it possible to completely renounce your roots and start life “from scratch”? How far are we willing to go to hide family secrets and avoid responsibility for the actions of our loved ones? And are we able to break the vicious circle of violence that is often passed down from generation to generation?
The film currently has a score of 7.1 out of 10 on IMDb, while it has a 75% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes.
