The Estate: Film Review
If you’re not in the mood for horror or awards contenders then I recommend The Estate, a laugh-out-loud comedy starring Toni Collette and Anna Faris.
They play sisters Macey (Collette) and Savanna (Faris), who run a cafe that is on the verge of going bust. When they learn their rich estranged Aunt Hilda (Kathleen Turner) is on her deathbed, they go to her house to look after her in an attempt to score her fortune at the last minute. But they have competition – their cousin Beatrice (Rosemarie Dewitt) and her husband James (Ron Livingston) are already there to butter her up and their other cousin Richard (David Duchovny) also has his eyes on the prize.
The Estate didn’t win me over immediately; I wasn’t convinced by it to begin with and it took a while to warm me up. The sisters aren’t super funny on their own so the film only really gets going when the competition between the cousins kicks off. They basically move into Hilda’s house and try to outdo the other to win the fortune – the desperate depths they sink to are pretty outrageous! Nothing is off limits when there are millions at stake.
The past resentments and the one-upmanship between the cousins are what make The Estate so fun. There are some zingy one-liners that made me laugh and the competition to see who can get Hilda laid first descends into crude, cringeworthy chaos. I thought the loveless marriage between Beatrice and her downtrodden husband was particularly well written, while Duchovny’s pervy sex pest had some hilarious moments of his own (although the character is pretty one-dimensional).
DeWitt was the star of the show as the high-maintenance neurotic who will stoop to any level to win and the demands she gave her husband were wild. Duchovny played the shameless cousin-fancying creep very well and Turner was exactly as commanding as you’d expect. It was nice to see Collette doing comedy for a change – she can do it all – but she was unfortunately outshone by her co-stars.
The Estate, written and directed by Dean Craig, took a minute to get going but it turned out to be an enjoyably silly family caper.
On Sky Cinema from Friday 13th January