If your politics are right, are you allowed to do something wrong?
That’s one of the questions threading Coup!, a new comedy of class hypocrisy opening in theaters August 2. A zippy romp that earns each of its tight ninety minutes on-screen, it takes place on an island off the East Coast—think Martha’s Vineyard—during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. In the opening scene, a rich muckraking journalist, Jay Horton, played by Billy Magnussen, types up a story valorizing “the workers” and decrying the “president’s capitalist cronies who shelter in their country mansions.”
Horton, who is writing from a country mansion himself, basks in his own goodness, calling for immediate closures of local businesses while the pandemic rages in the city. He is the twentieth century’s version of a nice, white liberal—vegetarian, pure of politics, humorless, slightly paranoid. But he meets his match in Floyd Monk, played by Peter Sarsgaard, an itinerant traveler with a penchant for gambling, drinking, and hunting, who blasts into the Hortons’ stately manor pretending to be their new private chef.
His class rage soon spreads like the flu to his fellow servants—the nanny and driver—who start loosening their aprons and asking Horton for double pay, then move into the main house over “safety” concerns. Then, the ferry to the mainland stops running, the power goes out, and Monk goes full coup d’état, taking over Horton’s pool and his red velvet slippers.
From Saltburn to Knives Out, manor movies are having a moment. (Coup! is less artistic and weird than the former, but more serious and topical than the latter.) It’s partly because Covid travel restrictions and safety protocols made single-location shoots more feasible, but also because screenwriters wrote what they knew, and for a year all they knew was the inside of their homes.
Coup! is setting off a wave of pandemic-themed entertainment. (Who needs escapism?) There’s the second season of the hit The Last of Us, a show based on a video game set in a world after a fungal infection decimates civilization, which will come out by 2025. There’s The Decameron, an upcoming comedy series, which takes place in 1348 during the bubonic plague, in Italy. All of them play with the inversion of power and privilege that plagues can bring, as blue-collar workers abruptly get labeled “essential” while the middle class sit uselessly at home.
The staff of Coup! twice bemoan the “one law of the land” that you “either have servants or you are one”—both times it feels trite. Bits of Coup! feel heavy-handed. When Horton tries to stop locals from stealing from his family’s vegetable garden, one screams, “Piss off, summer man.” We get it!
But overall the movie plays its politics close to its chest, the better to surprise the viewer. There’s no clear hero; both men are at turns contemptible, if cartoonishly so. It’s unclear if Monk is a lovable drifter here to teach everyone an important lesson about how things are in the real world, or a terrifying grifter. Horton is unable to keep control of his dominion—exemplified by the goofy but great choice to have him defend his home in different scenes with a badminton racket and a croquet mallet. Does he even deserve his position? And when he does get pushed to the brink of his own principles, does that make him a villain or merely human?
Monk is a stand-in for all manner of seductive scammers who take advantage of moments of fear and uncertainty, while Horton manifests the grisly trade-offs we make for our survival, our ambitions, and our ego. They’re both good, but Monk, played brilliantly by Sarsgaard, is way more exciting to watch. And he gets the killer line: “Times like this, nature has a way of creeping into the modern world. Brings out the beast in some and the beauty in others.”
One pandemic is over, but there’s always another one on the horizon. Coup! won’t be the last movie that reminds us how plagues test not only our survival instincts but also our political ones. Lean times force you to get real about priorities—what, and who, you’re willing to sacrifice.
Suzy Weiss is a reporter at The Free Press. Read her piece on gold and follow her on X @SnoozyWeiss.
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