Richard E Grant has been cast as Sir Chauncey Savage in Savage House, a 1715-set satire about a penniless aristocratic couple scrambling to survive a visit from the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. The film has been reviewed as a country-house caper built on fraud, vanity and desperation, with Grant playing a man whose title outruns his means.
That is why the role is drawing attention now. Grant, 67, is described as ideal as Chauncey, and his upbringing in colonial Swaziland, now Eswatini, is treated as part of what makes him such a natural fit for both upstairs and downstairs parts. For readers looking for who is in the film, Claire Foy plays Lady Savage, while Jack Farthing and Bel Powley appear as the household’s only two servants, Reginald and Dorothy. The family is broke because of Chauncey’s drinking, gambling and general profligacy, and the clock starts ticking when the Devonshires invite themselves to stay in ten days’ time.
Peter Glanz wrote and directed the film after making The Longest Week in 2014 and later co-scripting Captain America: Brave New World. Savage House was a lockdown project, and the plot turns on Chauncey’s scramble to sell Lady Savage’s jewellery, buy clothes and paintings, and recruit footmen from the peasantry before the guests arrive. The film’s interiors were shot at Syon House and West Wycombe, with exteriors at Montacute and Hatfield, giving the satire the polished country-house sheen it is after.
The cast is clearly one of the film’s strengths. So is the period machinery: the story is narrated in mannered chapters, with a derisive voiceover modelled on Barry Lyndon, and the servants revolt before Chauncey ends up with gangrene after a foolish duel. Dorothy’s blunt cry, “Resume licking my bum!”, captures the film’s comic register in miniature. But the review also lands a harder judgment: Glanz is not an upper-class insider, and it says he misunderstands the subject catastrophically. That matters because Savage House is trying to join a long line of country-house satires and dramas that includes Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, Brideshead, Saltburn and Bridgerton, and the gap between polished imitation and lived social knowledge can be the difference between a sharp send-up and a costume exercise.
Even so, the film now has a clear selling point: Richard E Grant as a waspish, self-deluding rogue at the center of a class comedy that knows exactly how to dress the room. What remains unclear is when audiences will actually get to see Savage House.
Claire Foy and Richard E Grant lead savage class satire in Savage House
