Heritage (2026) Film Review – Unnamed Footage Festival

Fifteen years after leaving Corsica, Marie and Daniel return to visit their elderly grandfather. Looking to capture their reunion, they pick up the family camcorder, but what they uncover is far from what they expected.

Heritage marks the feature film debut of director B.A. Croce, and it is billed as Corsica’s first found footage film. This becomes more notable, as the locale itself is part of the intrigue of this one, with the small Mediterranean city having its own unique language and, what many Westerners would consider, archaic and ‘backwoods’ vibes.

The set-up here is equally perfect for laying the foundation for the generational horror that Heritage tells, as two kids who moved from the area to Paris return to stay with their grandfather. A miserable, stubborn old man whose only wanted connection with his grandchildren is the hope they can help reunite him with his daughter, who he felt had abandoned him for a man and a new life. Essentially, you get that ‘strangers in a foreign land’ along with a certain familiarity that binds them a bit more to the area.

The siblings in question, Marie and David, played by Marie Bolbenes and Daniel Di Grazia, do a phenomenal job of making the familial connection feel authentic and sincere, which further helps immerse one in the story.

This is all essential to helping frame why Heritage works, as the actual found-footage horror elements are pretty by-the-numbers, with a slow but foreseeable build-up centered on strange behavior from the locals and legends attached to the area’s dark past. The culmination is pretty grim, not overly graphic, but undeniably grim, and the terror felt by the siblings adds a certain weight to the situation.

Visually, the film is shot with a camcorder (or edited to look that way), which gives it a nice lo-fi aesthetic, with the ‘need to record’ everything set up by sheer boredom of being on a remote island with no real technology. The majority of the film is spent with the two interacting with each other and the locals, with only minor disturbances leading up to the film’s climax. As such, those who want constant scares will find the pacing tedious, but at a tight runtime of around an hour, it also goes by fast enough not to drag, particularly with protagonists who are enjoyable to spend time with.

In all honesty, the movie is pretty much by-the-numbers from start to finish, but the found-footage genre does not always need reinvention or experimentation to work. For the first film from a region not known for film, it is a valiant effort to enter the found-footage world that most fans of the genre will enjoy. Moreover, it fits nicely into the Unnamed Footage Festival line-up, which always strives to both push the genre forward and make an international celebration of the medium.

Go in with tempered expectations, and Heritage delivers a solid found footage film. Though its location is arguably the only thing that will make it stand out, as it is a pretty straightforward, albeit well-done, entry in the genre.