It feels like the filmmakers behind Clawfoot have missed a trick by not calling it Blood Bath. Michael Day’s loopy thriller mashes together class divide drama and gonzo psycho thriller in a way that’s far from smooth, but is a giddily, brutally entertaining B-movie with gouts of vivid red on gleaming white tiles. It might not pull the bath mat out from underneath the viewer as much as it wants to, but somehow its imperfections are part of the charm.

Janet (Francesca Eastwood) is perturbed when two handymen, Leo and Sam (Milo Gibson and Oliver Cooper) turn up to install a new bathroom, including a clawfoot bath, which Janet hates. They claim her husband Evan (Nestor Carbonell) has made the arrangements, but Janet knows nothing about it, and says Evan is away on business. Leo becomes increasingly intrusive on Janet’s space, resisting all her attempts to get them to leave.

Initially playing out like Barbarian with a purgatorial edge like Buñuel‘s The Exterminating Angel, Clawfoot takes an abrupt switch into camp black comedy, and is none the worse for it. It takes some adjustment to accept the scenario; there’s no way anyone as self-possessed as Janet (played with icy, brittle superciliousness by Eastwood as a younger version of the type of role Nicole Kidman specialises in these days) would allow the obviously shady Leo to remain, despite Gibson’s way with blarney and superficial charm. But if you can switch into the extremely heightened mode it adopts from the beginning you’re in for a treat. If you can’t, it only gets more absurd.

Of course, Clawfoot‘s primary intent is satire. It is however more blunt object than sharp blade, coming from the pen of April Wolfe, the writer of the similarly bludgeoning but rather misunderstood 2019 take on Black Christmas. Think Desperate Housewives via American Psycho and you’re just about there. Once Olivia Culpo turns up to steal every scene as Janet’s less-than-Zen yoga buddy Tasha, the filmmakers jettison all the built up tension like ballast from a plunging aircraft, and the film takes on a murderously slapstick air.

Usually, such an abrupt turn would either make one’s enjoyment of such a film or break it. Yet this weird cut-and-shut of a movie transcends the obvious problem that the two halves simply don’t gel. Janet is clearly set up to be something apart from her perfectly-presented, Stepford housewife so everything  that follows simply affirms early suspicions. Each revelation merely has you nodding your head as it all clicks into place, albeit in a much more deliriously extreme way than you might expect. It’s an odd experience from the off, and it only gets odder, so Clawfoot would absolutely leave most people cold. Still, like one’s choice in bathroom decor, it’s all a matter of taste.

On digital platforms from Mon 23 Sep 2024