What one does not wish to know about oneself is precisely what fate will repeat to us endlessly.
— Carl Gustav Jung
With The Heir, Xavier Legrand continues his exploration of familial pain, weaving the invisible threads that link trauma to repression, memory to silence and violence. If in Custody (Jusqu’à la garde) the family was the battlefield where the irreparable was played out, here it becomes the stage for transmission—not of legacy, but of wounding.
The film opens with a high-angle shot: a slow-spinning spiral above the runway, as if the gaze itself were being sucked into a movement that offers no escape. This circular, quietly menacing motion is not just an aesthetic device—it is the visual symbol of inheritance, an invisible force that pulls everything along in its wake. Entering the world of fashion coincides with a gravitational pull, a trajectory already laid out that the protagonist tries to resist, but which envelops him mercilessly.
At the heart of this world of power and appearance, Ellias—the new creative director of the brand—makes a telling move: tasked with selecting models for the celebratory cover, he deliberately excludes the one too closely associated with the past, too marked by his predecessor. Thus, behind the apparent neutrality of an aesthetic choice lies a radical rejection of connection: Ellias wants to appear as an original figure, fatherless, rootless, a self-made creator. In that selection—or rather, exclusion—a strategy of erasure takes shape: building the new not upon the past, but against it.
And yet, the inexorable spiral of the opening scene has already told us what Ellias doesn’t yet know: one inherits not only a name, but also the void, the ghosts, the omissions that sustain it.
The film proceeds with a return, but there is nothing nostalgic in the air. The heir—a seemingly successful and emancipated young man, yet plagued by psychosomatic disorders—returns to his childhood home not to reclaim something, but to bury it once and for all. And yet, as often happens in origin stories, the past clings with stubborn vitality. The walls of the house are not merely plaster and memories: they are living flesh, pulsing memory, mute witnesses to an unspoken pain.
Legrand explores the family as a place of enigma and dissimulation. Every gesture, every word exchanged among the surviving members of the family constellation seems to carry a hidden layer. Transparency is a mirage. Here, communication does not convey clarity, but ambiguity. Inheritance is not so much a possession to be received as a poison to metabolize, an unspeakable truth to be swallowed.
Trauma, in The Heir, is not shown directly. There is no catharsis. Instead, there is an opaque slowness, a resistance to linear narrative: memories emerge in fits and starts, in almost aphasic images that fracture the protagonist’s identity like a crack spreading across the smooth surface of adult life. Repression operates as a structural principle: what has not been spoken returns—not with words, but with gestures, objects, and glances that hurt without explanation.
What is repressed returns. But it does not always knock.
— Jacques Lacan
Legrand avoids all forms of psychologism, opting instead for a quasi-phenomenological approach to suffering. The viewer doesn’t know, doesn’t see—they feel. The camera clings to bodies as if searching for a truth beneath the skin. It is in this gap—between what is shown and what remains opaque—that the film draws its power.
Family, Legrand seems to suggest, is always a surprise. But not in the sense of joyful discovery. It is a deep well where truths settle like sediment, and from which things occasionally resurface: a phrase, a photo, an inexplicable reaction. The heir is the one who, willingly or not, must confront this murky depth. He inherits not just a surname, but a web of silences, omissions, and guilt so subtly distributed that they seem to have evaporated—yet they remain, beneath the skin of the house, embedded in the flesh of memory.
In this sense, the scene of the video shown at the funeral marks the film’s most chilling moment—not for what it reveals, but for the further abyss it suggests. It is a visual threshold of the present, lived firsthand. And it will be the father’s friend—the recipient of the house keys and the invitation to “spend time in the basement”—who must confront, perhaps first of all, the dark heart of repression: an unwitting and belated witness, handed an inheritance that does not belong to him, yet sticks to him like a reflex action—one of trust and fate.
Ultimately, The Heir is a film about responsibility—not legal or social, but ontological. What does it mean to inherit a trauma? How can one survive what one has tried to forget? And above all: is it possible not to pass on what has destroyed us?
Trauma is not what happens to us, but what happens inside us in the absence of a witness.
— Peter A. Levine
A ruthless and necessary work, The Heir turns formal restraint into an ethical style. A film that, like trauma, cannot be forgotten.
The memory of the body is more faithful than that of the mind. And more cruel.
— Pascal Quignard
