‘Savage House’ Review: Claire Foy and Richard E. Grant Go to Ruin

Faces are saved, barely, as the body goes wholly to ruin in “Savage House,” a mordantly amusing tale of pretense, profligacy and the literally maddening pressures of the English class ladder — written and directed with surgical cruelty by, as it happens, an American. Arriving 12 years after his debut, the derivative indie romcom “The Longest Week,” Peter Glanz’s sophomore feature is an altogether sharper and more distinguished affair, even if it makes scant attempt to hide its debt to “The Favourite” and other caustic costumers of its ilk. Performed with gusto by Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, as a couple of Georgian grotesques sacrificing everything to host the aspirational dinner party of their dreams, it derives an odd poignancy from the smallness of its stakes, and the severity of its consequences.

That unexpectedly well-matched star pairing will be the chief selling point of “Savage House” when it opens in theaters this Friday, just two days after its world premiere at SXSW London — though it’s an odd package to release in summer with little advance buzz or festival tailwind. The brisk, nasty chill cast by the film may prove divisive; ditto its unapologetically ghastly characters. Glanz takes wicked delight in their suffering, to an extent that recalls nothing so much as Roald Dahl’s “The Twits” (albeit with considerably fancier grooming), and how much you share in that will determine your enjoyment of the proceedings. Either way, the film’s uncompromising commitment to its nauseous comic tone and ambience is impressive, as is its modestly budgeted but claustrophobically detailed evocation of 18th-century faux-noble rot. 

The right atmosphere of expensive decay is struck from the off by DP Adriano Goldman — a man with Emmy-winning experience of lighting Foy in far more flattering circumstances in “The Crown” — whose formal interior compositions are doused in deep oil-slick darkness whatever the time of day. All the better to hide the cracks, dust and grime in the outwardly grand stately home belonging to born-and-bred noblewoman Lady Savage (Foy) and her gold-digging husband Sir Chauncey (Grant), and to emphasize the ghostly affect of their ever-present pancake makeup and ash-cloud wigs.

Everything, after all, is a put-on for this couple, who are nearing bankruptcy thanks to Chauncey’s reckless spending, drinking and gambling; Lady Savage was once charmed by her formerly working-class husband’s louche ways, though these days she’s carrying on a sexually vigorous affair with his handsome valet Halifax (Jack Farthing), one of only three servants they can still afford. He, meanwhile, is carrying on something similar with her handmaiden Dorothy (Bel Powley), so fair enough. Amid all this adult misbehavior, their withdrawn teenage daughter Fanny (Kila Lord Cassidy) fixates on astronomy and her pet rats, regarding with some apprehension the money pit that will someday be hers.

The Savages’ social standing has dwindled to the point that only their equally horrible, grasping neighbors, the Bennetts (Richard McCabe and Vicki Pepperdine, both very funny), will fraternize with them. But a chance at redemption comes when they receive a letter from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, a much-admired pair of celebrity aristocrats, effectively inviting themselves to stay for an evening. Figuring this could vault them into the upper elite, the Savages proceed to spend more or less everything they have left on readying their estate, and themselves, for the opportunity. Never mind that Lady Savage must sell her precious family jewels to afford bigger, chintzier demonstrations of wealth, or that Chauncey has a rapidly worsening case of gout: Just pull a lavishly frilly sleeve over the festering wound and hope for the best.

Of course, the thing about keeping up appearances is that it doesn’t take a lot to pull them down, and it’s obvious from the beginning that the couple’s admittedly worst-laid plans can only collapse into a mud-soaked farce of duels, disease and disappointment. There’s a fair bit of mirth in all this, and in Glanz’s brittle, snippy dialogue, which is abetted by the casting. Grant, after all, was born to deliver lines like, “No self-respecting gentleman knows his bank balance,” while Foy evidently relishes getting to play a more poisonous variety of English rose than usual — the kind who, when her daughter complains of feeling like property to be sold off to the highest bidder, briskly replies, “Tragically enough, you are.”

Their performances give “Savage House” much of its vim, as well as a very slender sliver of humanity: Ghouls these people may be, but there’s something recognizable in their woebegone desperation to impress strangers for clout, in large part because the world hasn’t moved on all that much in the last 300 years. There’s a one-note quality to the film’s comedy that grows steadily, even deliberately, more abrasive over two hours, but the sad, brash, gradually shrinking bigness of the personalities at its center holds your attention. As does the lavishly spoiled finery of its mise-en-scène, which captures the Savages in all their pathetic contradictions: rich and tawdry, large and small, ugly and beautiful, less and hungrily striving for more.