Film - Coup!
Director: Joseph Schuman and Austin Stark
98min.
There’s change in the air, and it smells like class struggle, from a new breed of movies including Parasite, Triangle of Sadness and The Maid. The new comedy/mystery Coup! is a perfect addition to the trend. It’s set on an isolated mansion on New York’s Egg Island, where one of the super-rich – a journalist played by Billy Magnussen, has brought his family to wait out the 1918 Spanish Flu – all the while pretending to write about its’ horrors from the front lines. When his hand-picked vegetarian chef goes missing, he’s forced to pick a quick replacement. Enter Monk, a mysterious hoop earring-ed replacement played by Peter Sarsgaard with a delightful smirk behind his smile. Not too up on his vegetarian cuisine, chef Monk starts his attack on the 1% by first winning over the rest of the staff, and moving them into the mansion’s many rooms. But when he tries to persuade the journalist’s wife (Sarah Gadon) and children to fall in with his ideas of a more “equitable distribution of capital,” it sparks an amusing game of cat-and-mouse that just might get serious…
“The film is fun, broad and exuberant…the revolution begins at home!” Xan Brooks, The Guardian.
