Toni Collette, David Duchovny and Kathleen Turner aren’t the superstar names you’d expect to see in a movie that includes an extended scene where one character empties a colostomy bag to squelching and plopping sound effects. But that’s exactly what The Estate gives us, and the gross-out gags hit all the harder when they’re performed by some of our most talented and famous actors.
The plot is simple: Macey (Collette) and Savanna (Anna Faris) are sisters who are at risk of losing their café due to money issues. When they hear their wealthy and estranged aunt Hilda (Turner) has terminal cancer, they decide to ingratiate themselves to her to get written into the will. There are just a few problems: aunt Hilda hates them, and their cousins have the same idea. The obnoxious Beatrice (Rosemarie DeWitt) and her sweet husband James (Ron Livingston) already have an advantage over Macey and Savanna, who are the black sheep of the family, while the perennially horny Richard (Duchovny) has his sights set on aunt Hilda’s money and Macey.
Does everyone in this family sound like a terrible person? They are, perhaps with the exception of Collette’s character Macey, who reluctantly agrees to Savanna’s plan so her boyfriend can afford to quit his job and stay in the US. But their awful natures are also the body of The Estate, and the trait that the movie hinges on.
The jokes that come from this are amplified by the A-list cast. Everyone plays their characters incredibly straight. David Duchovny doesn’t shy away from playing the creepy cousin with genuine conviction, and Rosemarie DeWitt’s Beatrice is delightfully unaware of her own selfishness.
Toni Collette gets some of the movie’s best lines – or perhaps she makes her lines the best ones. Maybe it’s the fact we’ve rarely seen her play roles like this, or maybe it’s just because she’s so good at showing complex emotions with her whole body, but Macey is the beating heart of the movie that brings it back from the brink after particularly bleak jokes.
Faris, meanwhile, plays into her reputation for portraying messy characters with a heart of gold. (Or at least, in this case, a heart that wants her aunt’s gold.). The combination of Faris and Collette as sisters is perhaps surprising, but it works. They have an easy charm together, and the laughs they share seem genuine. They’re awful to everyone else, but not each other, which is their secret weapon during the scheming of the movie.
As in most of these movies, the cousins’ plans quickly derail when they reunite aunt Hilda with her first love. Their scheme to win her over by getting her laid blows up in their faces when aunt Hilda announces she’s getting married and leaving her fortune to her new husband. So now they have a new plan: get him out of the picture, by whatever means necessary. And to do that, they have to work as a family.
It’s a sweet message in a movie that likes nothing more than to make you squirm, and as it turns out, these awful people can be a whole lot more awful when they work together.
The individual parts of The Estate don’t make sense on paper — Toni Collette, David Duchovny, Kathleen Turner, an in-fighting family that’s dangerously close to sleeping with each other and/or killing each other — but the star power and dark humour culminates in a fun movie you can’t help but keep watching, just waiting to see what outrageous accident happens next or how their next plan unravels spectacularly. With our best actors playing characters like this, it’s the kind of film that truly needs to be seen to be believed.
The Estate is now streaming on Prime Video. Start your free 30-day Prime Video trial today.
