Savage House (2026) – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Claire Foy as Lady Savage and Richard E. Grant as Sir Chauncey Savage

Savage House ⭐️⭐️½

A period satire about class anxiety, vanity, greed, and decay, which uses its 18th-century setting as the backdrop for people behaving appallingly to one another, while pretending to be refined and respectable. A dirty, mud-drenched (in some cases poo-drenched too) antidote to the traditional, polite British costume drama.

Richard E. Grant is completely in his element here as he plays the deeply unlikable, narcissistic Sir Savage with such ego-free fierceness, wit, arrogance, and desperation. Claire Foy matches him beat-for-beat, with every glance and sharp line carrying a faint sense of contempt. Their toxic, transactional chemistry as husband and wife provides some of the film’s strongest sparks, and their unhinged and fully committed performances are what save the film.

Because let’s face it, the satire is never really as sharp or inspired as it tries to be, and tonally this film is all over the place.

It leans into the absurdity and cruelty of its world and characters, but often it feels more like a pantomime than anything else. To be honest, after a while, watching obnoxious people (however good the actors might be) becomes a bit tiresome and repetitive.

The film seems to revel in its own filth, nastiness, and chaos, with characters speaking in elevated, rhythmic sentences, only to suddenly drop F-bombs (or worse) in the middle of them. That might be amusing once or twice, but certainly that’s not enough for a whole feature film.

Visually, it follows a similar pattern, deliberately mixing the elegance of the period (at times it seems to evoke even Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon) with much more stomach-turning imagery (including explicit medical procedures, oozing pox pustules, animal poo, and mice).

Savage House opens with what looks like your classic montage sequence of the stately house being ‘woken up’ in the morning (windows opened, busts uncovered, that kind of thing), but soon enough the director reveals the decay baked into the texture of everything: a rotten pear being turned around to appear ripe, a pig lurking in a corridor, cracks in the walls. This is a world that wants to appear refined but is rotten at its core.

The cinematography relies on dim interiors, natural light or even candlelight scenes, creating a shadowy world. But its unsaturated tones carry that same coldness that the audience ends up feeling towards the characters and the film itself.

I had to really force myself to stay with it, and to be honest, I found it pretty unbearable and only smiled very occasionally.

Only towards the end, the film finally managed to find its feet, abandoning the silly slapstick and obvious jokes in favour of a slightly deeper and more emotional tone, but by that time, I had already decided that this wasn’t really the film for me, which is a shame, because I love those actors.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.