What do you do when a client worth £50m – thanks to family ownership of a Jamaican sugar plantation upon which a modern fortune was built – pops his clogs and is unexpectedly revealed to have cut his only child out of his will, leaving the lot to a hitherto unknown “African national” called Cudjoe East? Why, you call in your firm’s (likely only) biracial lawyer, Claudia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), to go over to Kingston, find him and discredit him as soon as possible. “Sounds like a job for a partner, really,” replies Claudia and, promotion thus secured, duly heads out for her mother’s homeland. She may wish, before we are very far in, that she had gone for senior partnership instead.
The planter’s house is one that has been appearing to her in recent nightmares that have been full of fires, terrified figures and strange symbols. But! She is a woman of the law, not superstition, so she sets the screaming Afro-gothic warnings aside and gets on with searching the house for anything that could suggest the pro-Cudjoe will is invalid and questioning the locals for any clue as to where Cudjoe himself might be. Her late client’s driver Angelo (Jeff Crossley) tells her that he introduced the pair about six months ago when his boss wanted to learn more about local history. Angelo assures her that she will not be able to talk Cudjoe into giving up his legacy.
