REVIEW: SAVAGE HOUSE

THE GIST

It took a bit to get into, but once I was hooked, I was immersed in it.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Savage House takes its time getting going, but watching these thoroughly unpleasant people slowly destroy themselves becomes far more entertaining—and involving—than I expected.

When a film fills its house with lazy, unfaithful and generally despicable people, it creates a fairly obvious problem: why should I care what happens to any of them? For much of the opening of Savage House, I didn’t. The film has wit and charm, although not quite as much as I expected, and it initially keeps its characters at such a distance that I struggled to find a way in. Yet that distance gradually becomes the point. Once the Savages’ comfortable little world begins to unravel, the film turns into an increasingly entertaining exercise in watching awful people make everything worse. Its greatest achievement is that, somewhere along the way, I stopped merely waiting for their downfall and started hoping they might somehow avoid it.

The narration did not help my initial resistance. It arrives around two minutes into the film and continues on and off for what feels like the next seven, dragging out an opening that already takes its time establishing itself. It reappears more sporadically throughout the film, but at first it felt like someone sitting beside me and explaining a joke before the film had been allowed to tell it. Visually, the film is similarly restrained. Its flat, desaturated appearance suits the dull and bleak period in which these characters live, but it could have used more brightness and contrast to bring out the darkness of the comedy. The classical, almost Amadeus-like music gives proceedings a playful elegance, although the images do not always match that energy.

Then again, perhaps a world this colourless is exactly where the Savages belong. Everyone appears to be cheating on everyone else, nobody seems particularly interested in doing anything useful, and decency is treated more like an optional extra than a requirement. Richard E. Grant is perfectly at home as Sir Chauncey Savage. He is one of those actors I recognise instantly and know will be good, even if I can never immediately remember what I last saw him in. He gives Chauncey just enough wounded pride and theatrical desperation to stop him from becoming a complete caricature. Claire Foy, as Lady Savage, is equally comfortable navigating the household’s moral wreckage. Neither character is especially likeable, but both become oddly watchable.

The film properly finds itself once a plot against the family emerges and their social standing begins to collapse. Rejections accumulate, plans backfire and Chauncey starts to unravel. From there, things simply get worse and worse—which is where Savage House gets better and better. By the final third, a persistent tension has taken hold, helped by urgent strings that occasionally reminded me of The Dark Knight. That may be an absurd comparison for a period dark comedy, but it was there. Even the narration, which had irritated me at the beginning, now seemed to fit. What once delayed the story begins to add to the sense that we are watching an inevitable catastrophe being recounted after everyone involved has ignored every available exit.

That inevitability makes the ending both satisfying and strangely disappointing. Chauncey and Lady Savage receive the sort of comeuppance the film has been promising from the beginning, and on paper they thoroughly deserve it. Yet by then, against my better judgement, they had grown on me. I was no longer just watching a collection of horrible rich people fall apart; I was watching my collection of horrible rich people fall apart, and I found myself hoping for a better outcome even while knowing one was unlikely. Savage House may take too long to invite us in, but once the doors close and the household begins collapsing around its inhabitants, it becomes difficult to look away. It might not demand a trip to the cinema, but it would make for a satisfyingly wicked watch once it reaches streaming.