Peter Sarsgaard is serving up sabotage in a 20th century satire.
The actor leads the film “Coup!,” which debuted at the 2023 Venice International Film Festival. Sarsgaard stars as a sinister private cook who is hired by a journalist (Billy Magnussen) to live with him on an island amid the Spanish Flu epidemic.
The official synopsis reads: Isolated on a seaside estate during the 1918 Spanish Flu, an entitled journalist (Magnussen) and his socialite wife (Sarah Gadon) take in a mysterious grifter as a private cook (Sarsgaard). When the plague descends on the island, the wily cook rouses his fellow staff to rebel and take over the mansion. Their wealthy employer suspects the cook’s coup is part of a more sinister agenda, and mind games between master and servant escalate into boisterous class warfare.
Faran Tahir, Skye P. Marshall, and Kristine Nielsen co-star.
Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman co-direct the feature that, according to the IndieWire review, takes the “eat the rich” message a little too literally.
“‘Coup!’ isn’t objectionable for its politics, it’s objectionable for trying to deny them. Unless its politics are just that muddled, and then Stark and Schuman have no idea at all how to express whatever it is they’re trying to say,” IndieWire’s Christian Blauvelt wrote. “Sarsgaard’s performance is all yokel charisma, a ‘man of action’ who takes charge and provides for his surrogate family by hunting game on the island when the last stores shutter and the ferry to the mainland stops. […] The message is clear, equivocating from the filmmakers aside: liberal males are hypocrites who only profess the things they do because they can’t be the Alpha Male they secretly fantasize to be. Unless, of course, they somehow can ultimately live out that Alpha Male fantasy.”
Sarsgaard will next star in Maggie Gyllenhaal’s “The Bride!” alongside Christian Bale, Penélope Cruz, Jessie Buckley, and Annette Bening.
“It’s this big, romantic, deeply romantic, wild, punk monster movie,” Sarsgaard said of wife Gyllenhaal’s film, in which he plays a detective investigating Bale’s Frankenstein. “I think it’s going to be energizing! It’s rambunctious! People are going to be very surprised that this is Maggie’s second movie. It is nothing, at all, like [Gyllenhaal’s directorial debut] ‘The Lost Daughter.’”
“Coup!” premieres in theaters August 2. Check out the trailer below.
