Busan 2026 Review: INHERIT, Seductive Thai Insect Horror

A Thai film that screened at this year's Busan International Film Festival, Inherit arrived with minimal press. Billed as a midnight cult movie, it turned out to be an overtly sexy ride, one that completely won over a packed audience in the festival's 3000-seat outdoor venue.

Directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun, Inherit is based on a well-known Thai novel that's been filmed several times before. In the story, a curse is handed down over 800 years after the Orlan family betrays Woranart. Revenge will come in the form of a centipede demon.

We first meet the Orlans, an old-money clan, at a funeral. The father runs a factory whose toxins have killed several workers. His eldest son is a pedophile, his younger son a sex-obsessed drug addict. Oui (Thitiya Jirapornsilp), the youngest daughter, suffers from a possibly misdiagnosed blood disease.

Oui and her mother (Sinjai Plengpanich, star of an earlier Inherit version) are surprised one afternoon by a visitor to their gated mansion. Woranart (Davika Hoorne) claims to be Oui's 85-year-old grandmother. But she looks like a supermodel.

Impossibly slim and glamorous, Woranart sunbathes in a bikini by the family pool, tempting Oui to disobey her mother's strict rules. Woranart proceeds to seduce Oui's brother, as well as everyone else she meets: men, women, relatives, strangers, all while dressed in haute couture.

Woranart doesn't just bait her victims: she feeds on them as well, using their souls to replenish her body. But in order to survive, she must fulfill the curse against the Orlan family. That means enacting a centipede vomit ritual with Oui.

Very little of this plot is spelled out in Inherit. Instead, Pisanthanakun focuses on mood and atmosphere, on simmering sexual tension, and on Hoorne's incredible beauty.

A model for Gucci and other houses, Hoorne is also a producer and director known for tackling challenging roles. In her last film, A Useful Ghost, she played a vacuum cleaner. Here she clearly relishes enacting an evil beauty, toying with characters until they blush and squirm. Or explode.

Pisanthanakun offers some satisfying moments of gore and death, including decapitations, dismemberments, poisonings, and encounters with deep fryers. But the director respects his audience, carefully setting up scenes instead of relying on jump shocks.

Special effects include a few good practical stunts and some disappointing CGI, but the real point to Inherit is the pervasive sense of illicit, destructive sex, or at least as much as censors will allow.

Pisanthanakun made his reputation as a director with horror titles like Shutter. (He's also worked in romance and comedy.) Inherit is a solid genre entry that needs wider distribution.

The film screened at the 2026 Busan International Film Festival. Visit the film's page at the festival site for more information.