The Riot Club (2014)

The Riot Club arrives from 2014 with the confidence of a dinner guest who has already read the room and decided it is beneath him. Lone Scherfig directs Laura Wade's adaptation of her own play about an Oxford dining society of privately educated young men who believe money settles every account, and the film's animating idea is that unearned privilege is not merely rude but structurally protected. Alistair, the cold ideologue, delivers monologues about the rich and the poor that the film stages as argument, and when the landlord calls them spoiled brats, they beat him unconscious. The contempt for wealth here is the engine, not a garnish. This is the film's dominant register, and it commits to it.

Elsewhere the cultural ledger is thinner. A woman directs, and the film builds its indictment of male entitlement around the graphic degradation of Lauren, though she functions as a casualty inside the men's story instead of an agent of her own. Hugo is openly homosexual and carries a quiet, unrequited longing for Miles, and the pairing of Toby and Ed reads as an unusually intimate attachment, but these remain supporting textures. Dimitri's Greek parentage draws snide remarks about nouveaux riches, a thread of ethnic condescension that never becomes the film's subject. The cast is almost entirely white and privately schooled, which is the point being made, not an oversight.

The absences are instructive. There is no climate anxiety, no body-positive counterweight, no neurodivergent perspective, no revisionist reworking of the historical record. The sermonizing is present but dramatised, delivered through character and violence instead of a podium, which keeps the preachy impulse to a simmer. The result is a well-tailored tantrum against inherited power that never quite escapes the drawing room it despises. We have seen this anger before, and we will see it again, and it will still be wearing a dinner jacket.