A new review has put Savage House on the map as a 1715 country-house satire with Claire Foy and Richard E Grant at its centre, and it does not spare the film. Peter Glanz’s period caper, built around the fallen Savage family, is being framed as a comic study of aristocratic decay, fraud and self-delusion.
That is why readers are searching for Claire Foy now: she plays Lady Savage, while Grant takes on Sir Chauncey Savage, a chancer and swindler who has married above his station and helped drag the family into penury. The film was made as a lockdown project and sets its action in the year 1715, with the Savages told the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire will arrive in ten days. Sir Chauncey starts scrabbling to restore his fortunes, selling Lady Savage’s jewellery, buying clothes and paintings, and recruiting footmen from the peasantry.
Glanz, who previously directed The Longest Week in 2014 and later co-scripted Captain America: Brave New World, has built the film as an elaboration on Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress. The house itself is a patched-together creation, with interiors knitted from Syon House and West Wycombe and exteriors shot at Montacute and Hatfield. The Savages live there with two servants, Reginald and Dorothy, who are not merely household help but conspirators. He is Chauncey’s valet and criminal accomplice; she is Lady Savage’s sneaky maid. The two underlings are in league with each other and plan to supplant their masters.
That setup gives the film its bite, but also the point where the praise turns. The production is described as well cast, well acted, sumptuously set and dressed, and beautifully photographed, yet it is said to misunderstand the whole arrangement catastrophically. Chauncey is sleeping with Dorothy, Lady Savage is being serviced by Reginald, the servants revolt, and the new footmen are larcenous Jacobites who bring the pox into the house. Even Chauncey’s foolish duel ends in gangrene. The machinery of scandal is all there; the complaint is that the film sees the costume and misses the corruption underneath.
That matters because Savage House is arriving into a crowded field of country-house satire, where the competition includes everything from Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale and Brideshead to Saltburn and Bridgerton. It is also modeled, in its derisive voiceover and chaptered narration, on Barry Lyndon. On the evidence of this review, its cast and surfaces are strong enough to hold attention, but its grasp of what makes the joke sting is the question hanging over it now.
