The British aristocracy has never been so wretched

Our propensity to be seduced by the grandeur of country houses and noble families is rarely impeded by our politics. New Statesman writers have bravely confessed in these pages to weeping at Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, despite it being shameless Tory propaganda, or enjoying Brideshead, Saltburn, Bridgerton – all having the same alarming effect on audiences who should know better.

Savage House – an addition to the genre – is not quite so easy to swoon over. It misunderstands the whole deal catastrophically. It was written and directed by Peter Glanz, an American filmmaker whose previous credits include directing one movie, the romcom The Longest Week (2014), and co-scripting Captain America: Brave New World. This new film was a lockdown project: certainly, it all takes place in one house at a time of plague.

Perceptive viewers will remark at once that Glanz is no Julian Fellowes or Emerald Fennell: he is not an upper-class insider. It takes a while, though, to grasp how off-key his take on this subject is, since the film is so well cast and acted, so sumptuously set and dressed and so well photographed by Adriano Goldman (The Crown).

Set in 1715, Savage House is an elaboration on Hogarth’s great series of paintings The Rake’s Progress. Sir Chauncey Savage (Richard E Grant) is a chancer and a swindler, a man of low birth who has managed to marry far above his rank. Lady Savage (Claire Foy) comes from a noble family, the Savages of Yorkshire, fallen on hard times, but she still brings to the marriage a magnificent house, ingeniously knitted together for the film from interiors at Syon House and West Wycombe, exteriors at Montacute and Hatfield.

Thanks to Chauncey’s drinking, gambling and general profligacy, the pair are penniless, reduced, improbably, to living in this ever more filthy pile with just two servants: his valet and criminal accomplice Reginald (Jack Farthing) and her sneaky maid Dorothy (Bel Powley). Sir Chauncey is knocking off Dorothy, Lady Savage is serviced by Reginald (“Resume licking my bum!”) but the underlings are in league with each other too, planning to supplant their master and mistress.

Then a letter arrives. The Duke and Duchess of Devonshire have invited themselves to stay in ten days’ time. Sir Chauncey is galvanised. If they can carry off hosting these genuine toffs, maybe their fortunes can be restored? They prep desperately, selling off her jewellery, buying clothes, paintings, recruiting footmen from the peasantry. It’s a parodic, madcap version of the first Downton film, when the king and queen come to stay. Or a tonto take on Come Dine with Me.

It goes horribly wrong. The servants revolt. Chauncey, already crippled by gout, gets gangrene, after a foolish duel. The new footmen are larcenous Jacobites, bringing the pox into the house too. The Savages’ dreams of social climbing are cruelly dashed.

All of this is narrated in mannered chapters with a derisive voiceover clearly modelled on that in Barry Lyndon, Stanley Kubrick’s incomparable masterpiece about the rise and fall of an 18th-century fraudster.

Richard E Grant is ideal as Chauncey, half the nob he played in Downton and Saltburn, half the desperado he was in Withnail and I. Grant’s upbringing in colonial Swaziland (Eswatini) has left him a natural for both upstairs and downstairs, dodgy aristos and endearing crooks – and he embraces this flamboyant role. Claire Foy (the Queen in The Crown; Anne Boleyn in Wolf Hall) is equally excellent as an aristocrat on the way out.

The wigs are immense, the lighting evocative. Yet for all the period detail, Glanz brings a contemporary American sensibility to the English past. He’s not charmed; in fact he finds it physically repulsive. Teeth are terrible, health and hygiene disregarded. Pheasants drip blood everywhere, guts and offal abound. There are rats and pigs indoors. Everything stinks. The facade of grandeur masks only filth. “Shit!” everyone keeps saying, stepping into it. So, not much scope here for surreptitious daydreaming – the great motor of these productions. Glanz seems to believe he’s made a telling satire with a contemporary application: “With everything going on in the world right now, it feels criminal to not make a film that’s saying something, that’s shining a spotlight on inequities and inequalities.”

Eh? If he has satirised anybody here, it’s social climbers, fraudster wannabes, wretches. Not the aristocracy represented by the Devonshires, who come off unscathed. So the film doesn’t work at all, neither dreamy nor funny, just mucky. Very odd. Back to Blandings Castle for me.

Savage House is in cinemas now

[Further reading: Eagles of the Republic is an audacious exposé of the Egyptian state]