In 2007 and 2010 British writer-director Dean Craig gave us the farce Death at a Funeral (the latter, a US remake, directed by Neil LaBute), of which I must admit I was never a fan. But there is something in the relentless bad taste in his new all-star black comedy – something in the fanatical emphasis on the importance of the exposed penis in all its unimpressive smallness – that is actually weirdly effective.
Kathleen Turner plays Hilda, a cantankerous, disagreeable and extremely wealthy old lady who is dying of cancer, and finds that her greedy and unctuous nieces and nephews all show up, hoping for a slice of the will. These are Macey (Toni Collette), Savannah (Anna Faris), Richard (David Duchovny) and Beatrice (Rosemarie DeWitt), along with Beatrice’s bewildered husband James (Ron Livingston). To get into Aunt Hilda’s good books, Savannah and Macey track down their aunt’s high-school crush to give her a sentimental reunion with him, but disaster beckons when Hilda is so entranced she decides she wants to marry this old man thus making him her sole beneficiary.
