‘Coup!’ Review: Pandemonium in a Pandemic — No, Not That One

The cook, a thief, a wife and her lover — in “Coup!,” these familiar players rub shoulders not in an elite eatery, but in a seaside manor.

The film, written and directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, is an energetic satire of pandemic-era bourgeois hypocrisy. Its supposed innovation, though, is to set its quarantine-based rogueries a century before Covid, when another pandemic — the 1918 influenza — spurred familiar waves of business closures, resource shortages and desperate fears of contagion.

It is amid these disasters that we meet the liberal journalist Jay (Billy Magnussen), his wife, Julie (Sarah Gadon), and their two children. The family is sheltering from the disease on their island estate, where domestic personnel tend to the cooking, cleaning and nannying. The help treasure their siloed haven, until Floyd Monk (Peter Sarsgaard), a new chef from the mainland, suggests that the staff deserve better working conditions.

The movie seeks to pit Jay — a narcissist pretending to report from the ravaged mainland while being cosseted by staff — against Monk, a blue-collar worker. “Coup!” exaggerates the men’s difference by making Monk a swashbuckler (his dangly earrings evoke Captain Jack Sparrow) and Jay a pacifist, vegetarian and out-and-out drip.

As Monk lifts the veil enshrouding the estate’s hierarchy, he also emasculates Jay in the eyes of the household. This implication that virility trumps effeteness is, amid an otherwise straightforward comedy, an uncomfortably regressive way to tell the story of how people vie for power in hard times.

Coup!
Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters.