In Savage House, his face is barely saved, but his body is completely destroyed. It’s a modern, entertaining tale of the strains of pretentiousness, debauchery, and the literal madness of class in the British hierarchy, written and directed with surgical brutality, and coincidentally by an American. Twelve years after his debut, the offshoot indie rom-com “The Longest Week,” Peter Granz’s second film is overall sharper and better, even if it makes little effort to hide its debt to the acerbic outfits of “The Favourite” and its ilk. Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy, played with gusto, play a grotesque Georgian couple who sacrifice everything to host the dinner party of their dreams, creating strange poignancy in the smallness of the stakes and the seriousness of the consequences.
This unlikely pairing of stars may be the biggest selling point for Savage House, which opens in theaters this Friday, just two days after its world premiere at SXSW London – but it’s an odd package to release in the summer with little advance buzz or festival tailwind. The film’s refreshingly unpleasant chill may be divisive. So are the unapologetically terrifying characters. Granz takes wicked pleasure in their suffering in a way that is no less memorable than in Roald Dahl’s The Twits (albeit with some rather ostentatious dressing), and how much you identify with it will determine your enjoyment of the proceedings. Either way, the film’s nauseatingly comic tone and uncompromising commitment to atmosphere are just as impressive as its modestly budgeted but claustrophobically detailed evocations of 18th century pseudo-aristocratic corruption.
The right atmosphere of expensive decay is struck from the start by cinematographer Adriano Goldman. He’s the same guy who won an Emmy for playing Foy in more flattering circumstances on The Crown. His formal interior compositions are shrouded in deep darkness, like an oil slick, regardless of the time of day. It hides the cracks, dust and grime of the outwardly grand mansion owned by the aristocratic born-and-bred Lady Savage (Foy) and her gold miner husband Sir Chauncey (Grant), all the more so as to accentuate the ghostly influence of the ever-present pancake makeup and ash cloud wigs.
As it turns out, it’s all a sham for the couple, who are on the verge of bankruptcy due to Chauncey’s reckless spending, drinking, and gambling. Lady Savage, once fascinated by her working-class husband’s dissolute ways, has recently carried on a sexually active relationship with the handsome servant Halifax (Jack Farthing), one of only three servants still able to afford one. Meanwhile, he continues to do the same with his maid of honor, Dorothy (Bel Powley). Amid all this adult misbehavior, a reclusive teenage girl, Fanny (Kira Lord Cassidy), is obsessed with astronomy and her pet mouse, with some misgivings about the money pit that will one day be hers.
The Savages’ social standing declines to the point where only their equally terrifying and persistent neighbors, the Bennets (Richard McCabe and Vicki Pepperdine, both very funny), befriend them. But a chance for redemption comes when she receives a letter from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, popular among the celebrity aristocracy, effectively inviting her to stay for the night. Thinking that this would make them a part of the upper elite, the Savages began to spend more or less everything they had left preparing their fortunes and themselves for that opportunity. Never mind that Lady Savage has to sell her prized family jewelry in order to display greater and greater wealth, or that Chauncey has rapidly worsening gout. All you have to do is pull the extravagantly ruffled sleeve over the festering wound and hope for the best.
Of course, the key to respectability is that it doesn’t take much to drag them down, and it’s clear from the start that a couple with apparently the worst plans will only collapse into a muddy farce of duels, illness, and disappointment. There’s quite a bit of fun in all this, and in Glantz’s brittle, crisp dialogue, facilitated by the casting. After all, Grant was born to deliver lines like “No self-respecting gentleman knows his bank balance,” while Foy clearly enjoys playing the more poisonous English rose variety than usual — the kind that snaps when his daughter complains of feeling like she’s being sold off to the highest bidder, “Sadly, you are.”
Their performances give “Savage House” much of its charm, as well as a modicum of humanity. These people may be ghouls, but there’s something recognizable in their heartbreaking desperation to impress strangers for influence. That’s mainly because the world hasn’t progressed that much in the past 300 years. The film’s comedy has a one-note quality that steadily, even deliberately, becomes more exciting over the course of two hours, but the sad, brash, and gradually shrinking larger-than-life figures of the characters at its center steal the show. The beauties of extravagant and indulgent mise-en-scène likewise capture the savage in all his pitiful contradictions: rich and vulgar, large and small, ugly and beautiful, inferior and greedily striving for more.
