★★★★★ - THE TIMES
- Grant excels as a slippery Georgian social climber and Foy is equally compelling as his long-suffering wife in a brilliant black comedy -
You don’t need to be even loosely conversant in the Jacobite uprising of 1715, the smallpox outbreak of the same year and the political tensions in Georgian England to fully appreciate this new black comedy starring Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy. But it helps. The film, from British-American writer-director Peter Glanz, is uproariously funny, suddenly bleak and then tragically poignant, often within the same sequence. It features Grant on top form as the slippery social-climbing parvenu Sir Chauncey Savage and Foy as his long-suffering yet equally mischievous wife, Lady Savage.
As the film opens, Sir Chauncey, an inveterate gambler and debt-ridden alcoholic, has squandered his wife’s fortune, sold most of her land and even flogged several of the ancient portraits that hang inside the titular Yorkshire mansion (actual location: Montacute House in Somerset). “This entire house is covered in a film of filth and poverty” is one of Sir Chauncey’s peevish lines, neatly encapsulating the family crisis. News, however, that the venerated Duke and Duchess of Devonshire are planning to visit Savage House throws its denizens into a frenzy of anticipation.
A successful ducal sojourn could resurrect the Savages’ standing and save them from an imminent stay, Sir Chauncey says, in Fleet debtors’ prison. The only thing in their way? Sir Chauncey’s affair with the resentful maid Dorothy (Bel Powley), Lady Savage’s tryst with the scheming valet Reginald (Jack Farthing), a vengeful creditor called Mr Black (Pip Torrens), a duel, an amputation, a bad case of the pox and, crucially, a growing national split between the supporters of the Hanoverian King George and the backers of the Catholic Old Pretender James Stuart.
There’s a lot to absorb here. The mood is paramount. Savage House is a place of tomfoolery, sickening tension, inequality and violent undercurrents. Glanz reveals in a Tatler magazine interview that the film was inspired by the US Capitol attacks on January 6, 2021, and by the reality of a bifurcating society that was contesting the legitimacy of its leader at a time of increasing economic disparity.
The film has a thrilling sense of an intermingled now and then, a belief that everything changes in history and yet remains exactly the same. A recurring sequence that examines the ever more frazzled Savages, including their daughter Fanny (Kila Lord Cassidy), posing for an idealised portrait clearly foreshadows the perfect lies of social media that are presented by the great and the good.
This is all filtered through a heavyweight skein of references, especially Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, with the film’s droll narrator (Robert Bathurst), 1970s Paramount lenses and candlelit night-time interiors. Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress is also in there, as are the early period films of Peter Greenaway, especially The Draughtsman’s Contract.
The drama nonetheless lives or dies based solely on the two central performances, both of which are extraordinary. Foy, when unleashed, can dazzle in deeply committed and singular turns. Her Lady Savage appears light and wry, which allows the character to appear sweetly submissive and coyly uninterested until, suddenly and severely, she’s definitely not.
Grant, meanwhile, can do that excessively theatrical bon viveur shtick in his sleep, and has arguably done so since his breakthrough role in Withnail & I, but this is different. Sir Chauncey is dementedly obsessed with the upper classes and with approval from above. He has impostor syndrome, feels as if he doesn’t belong and is cursed with, in his own words, “the odious taint of an outsider”. He is, in short, an impossibly modern antihero. He’s deranged, yes, but he’s also sad. When Sir Chauncey learns that guests have been declining his invitations, the camera stays fixed on his crestfallen features while a single tear falls from his eye. It’s tragic, moving and quite brilliant
- Kevin Maher, THE TIMES
Savage House is now playing at Light House Cinema!