Savage House is the kind of period film that proves costume dramas don’t have to behave themselves. Set in 18th‑century England during a pox outbreak and the Jacobite uprisings, Peter Glanz’s grimly funny black comedy turns a crumbling country estate into a petri dish of class anxiety, marital desperation and unchecked rot. The result is grotesque, gorgeous and frequently hilarious, like a lavish prestige drama left out in the sun just a bit too long.

At the heart of the film are Sir Chauncey Savage and Lady Savage, played with unrestrained relish by Richard E. Grant and Claire Foy. This aristocratic couple is teetering on the brink of financial ruin, pinning all their hopes on a make‑or‑break dinner for the visiting Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. With creditors closing in, they marshal their exhausted staff for a frantic sprint toward social salvation, and the more they strive for elegance, the more the film parades the filth, violence and self‑delusion festering beneath their powdered wigs and polished silver.

Grant leans into Chauncey’s terror of slipping back into his working‑class origins, playing him as a man who would rather lose a limb than his social standing, while his increasingly absurd wigs and manic grin track his descent from pompous host to drunken wreck. Foy grounds the chaos with a beautifully dry, acerbic Lady Savage who knows marriage is “hard work” in an era when that includes hiding gangrenous wounds under brocade. Around them, the astronomy‑obsessed daughter and overburdened servants quietly reframe the story, with one of the film’s sharpest jokes being that the pet mice in a toy mansion live better than the humans cleaning up after the Savages.

Visually, Savage House is a banquet that constantly threatens to turn your stomach. Glanz builds candlelit interiors and painterly compositions that recall a grubbier Barry Lyndon, then gleefully smears them with blood, sweat and bodily fluids. Ornate dinners are undercut with queasy close‑ups of chewing mouths, infected flesh and dubious 18th‑century “medicine,” reminding us that every elegant tableau rests on a foundation of waste and exploitation.

Tonally, the film walks a tightrope between Blackadder‑style absurdism and something far more acidic. The dialogue crackles with barbed one‑liners and sight gags, yet Glanz often abandons the jokes to let the horror of aristocratic rot sink in. Savage House invites comparison to The Favourite, but where that film leans into surrealism, Glanz is obsessed with the economics of image, returning again and again to the labour required to maintain the illusion of refinement.

For all its excesses, Savage House is a richly entertaining slice of cinematic bile. Grant and Foy deliver some of their boldest work as a couple willing to drink, bleed and rot their way through history for one more seat at the right table. If you enjoy watching aristocrats drown in their own filth while the people propping them up quietly sharpen their knives, this gangrenous cautionary tale is essential viewing and a wicked reminder that the rich are, in every sense, revolting.