Black-belt performances from Claire Foy and Richard E Grant put some vim and vigour into this haranguingly one-note and unidirectional period romp of the raucously bewigged and be-poxed 18th century. It’s written and directed by American film-maker Peter Glanz, who gives us candlelit interiors like a knockoff Barry Lyndon, and periodic deafening orchestral stabs with a touch of Amadeus as furious people in costume storm down corridors. But Grant and Foy are always there, selling it hard and there are one or two nice lines.
They play Sir Chauncey and Lady Savage, who are living in a vast crumbling country estate: he’s a parvenu, an adventurer, a lover of the new Hanover dispensation who loathes Jacobites, but fundamentally a social alpinist who married for money and took his wife’s noble name. She was entranced by his roguish ways and she forgave him everything but is, however, having an affair with the footman, Halifax (Jack Farthing), while he is carrying on with the maid, Dorothy (Bel Powley). Richard McCabe and Vicki Pepperdine play two ghastly neighbours with dodgy teeth: the only people who will associate with them.
Yet just when it seems that the Savages are socially beyond the pale, they are thrilled beyond measure at the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire inviting themselves for dinner as part of some sort of quasi-royal “progress”. The Savages’ social stock price rockets, they borrow ruinously to make the house worthy of their guests’ imminent arrival and the slide towards calamity begins. It’s all a bit strenuous but Foy and Grant are such class acts that they make this watchable.
Savage House screened at SXSW London and is out on 5 June in the UK and US.