‘The Estate’: Review

Dir/scr: Dean Craig. US. 2022. 96mins

The Estate offers the modest pleasures of watching some truly despicable members of a dysfunctional family plot and scheme in order to curry favour with their ailing matriarch, desperate to seize the sizeable inheritance she’ll leave behind after she dies. Writer-director Dean Craig gathers a winning ensemble for his dark comedy and, intermittently, the characters’ rank awfulness is a joy to behold. But despite boasting a fair amount of snide one-liners and a general air of gleeful misanthropy, the film ends up becoming strained and predictable, not quite liberating or shocking enough.

A showcase for some talented comedic actors to play rotten people

After premiering at the London Film Festival, The Estate opens in the US on November 4, featuring a cast led by Toni Collette, Anna Faris and David Duchovny. (Kathleen Turner is agreeably irascible as the ageing aunt whose estate everyone wants.) Craig wrote the original Death At A Funeral and, like that farce, his latest luxuriates in its characters’ bad behaviour. But minuscule buzz suggests a short theatrical life for a film that might find a more comfortable home on streaming and VOD rental. 

Macey (Collette) and Savanna (Faris) are unhappy sisters running an unsuccessful cafe, worried how they’ll make ends meet. When they learn that grumpy, rich Aunt Hilda (Turner) has terminal cancer, Savanna hatches a plan: if they pay her a visit and get on her good side, perhaps she’ll write them into her will, solving their financial problems forever. But when they travel to Hilda’s home, they quickly realise that their calculating cousins — snooty Beatrice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and horny himbo Richard (Duchovny) — have had the same thought, all of them jockeying for position to be Hilda’s favourite.

Running a little over 90 minutes, the film is a showcase for some talented comedic actors to play rotten people who lack moral fibre or any sense of shame. And, for a while, The Estate succeeds as a low-key but amusing portrait of greed and callousness, Craig and his cast seeing how far they can push the outrageous antics and making room for bawdy sex jokes and gross-out bodily humour.

While nobody is especially “good” among this pit of cobras, Macey at least has some semblance of scruples, needing the money but also sensitive to Hilda’s feelings. Collette locates the character’s decency, which she neatly intertwines with a worn-down resignation about the shambles the twice-divorced Macey has made of her life. She may not be as coldhearted as her cohorts but her willingness to go along with Savanna’s scheme suggests her spinelessness, which Collette makes funny and also somewhat poignant.

Her costars give less subtle performances, often to good effect. Duchovny is especially entertaining as an utter dolt who keeps hitting on Macey, convinced that there’s really nothing wrong with cousins hooking up. (It’s a sign of the film’s unapologetically bad-taste humour that Richard — he prefers you call him Dick — makes a passionate case that cousins dating will be the next societal stigma to fall, blithely comparing it to transgender rights.) The Estate is filled with supremely shallow individuals driven by their base urges — for love, for money, for superiority over their fellow family members — and the cast frequently elevate their one-dimensional roles through withering line-readings or deadpan reaction shots.

But Craig hasn’t fleshed out this story enough to justify even its short runtime. Perhaps not surprisingly, because The Estate quickly establishes the depths to which these characters will sink, diminishing returns start to set in once Macey, Savanna and the rest keep topping themselves with their increasingly ill-advised strategies to win over Hilda. (The revelation that she never got over someone from her past inspires a search for the man, resulting in some button-pushing provocation that’s not very clever.) And while Turner has a ball portraying this unpleasant matriarch, there’s not much to the character beyond her monotonous abrasiveness. 

As expected, plot twists loom in the distance as the devious cousins battle for Hilda’s fortune. But although it’s easy to understand why these actors would relish the opportunity to sink their teeth into material so unremittingly caustic, ultimately The Estate never evolves beyond its aggressive mean-spiritedness. These people are terrible, but they’re terrible in ways that soon stop feeling fresh.