Of all the recent reboots of 20th-century franchises, among the hottest and most terrifying is populist authoritarianism. It is playing in revival halls on multiple continents, drawing a wide range of performers and cultivating a rabid fan base.
History may be repeating in real life as tragedy. But HBO’s lightly-yet-darkly entertaining “The Regime,” a six-episode series beginning on Sunday, plays it as full-on farce.
“The Regime,” written by Will Tracy (“The Menu,” “Succession”), deposits us in a palace somewhere in “Middle Europe.” Chancellor Elena Vernham (Kate Winslet), who rules her small country through surveillance, violence and telegenic charisma, has developed the debilitating fear that the residence is infested with deadly mold spores.
Whether the mold is real is immaterial; her retinue of advisers, oligarchs and sundry quacks must behave like it is. And the fear underlying Elena’s paranoia is clear. Seven years after taking power in the “free and fair election” that ousted her left-leaning predecessor (Hugh Grant), she senses that her kleptocratic state is rotting from within.
Her deliverance arrives in the form of Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a soldier reassigned to palace duties after putting down a workers’ protest a touch too enthusiastically. (The press nicknames him “The Butcher.”)
Herbert becomes Elena’s mold man, shadowing her with a hydrometer to measure the humidity of her surroundings. “If she smells mold, you smell it too,” instructs Agnes (Andrea Riseborough), Elena’s mordant, put-upon aide.
The palace he steps into is part totalitarian caricature, part dysfunctional extended family. Elena, married to the uxorious Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne) but childless, indulgently “co-parents” Agnes’s son with epilepsy (Louie Mynett). There’s a patriarch too: Elena’s right-wing politician father, dead for a year and decomposing in a glass coffin, with whom she has Freudian, one-way heart-to-hearts.
If not for the national and implicitly global stakes, it might all be the stuff of a fantastical 1960s sitcom. They really are a scre-am.
The stakes rise, however, as Elena falls under Herbert’s sway, seeing him as a connection to the rough peasant heart of her country. He puts her on a program of folk remedies that involve mustard poultices and hearty bowls of dirt. As a political adviser, he answers her questions about “what the nobodies want.” What they mainly want, as the tattooed Rasputin would have it, is aggressive nationalism, a series of fists in a series of faces.
The codependence between Elena and Herbert is the dangerous ballet on which “The Regime” turns. Winslet is a dark-comic delight, with a clipped diction, an imperious bearing and hair-trigger anxiety. You’d expect Winslet to nail the drama, but she excels in comic set pieces, vamping her way through Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” at a state banquet with Nicholas on the keyboard, like a fascist Captain & Tennille.
Schoenaerts has the thinner role, but he makes Herbert’s muscly brutishness add up to more than the sum of his six-pack. He’s a human weapon, tormented in private, explosive around others. His bond with Elena is erotic and combative, but it’s bigger than two people. She sees him like the nation’s soil come to life; when she adopts his populism and “country medicine,” it is as if she’s ingesting her country’s terroir.
What that country is, and how it relates to our world, “The Regime” keeps productively vague. It’s somewhere east of the west, west of the east and south of Poland, with mineral resources that allow it to play footsie with both Washington and Beijing. If it’s not in the precise spot of Viktor Orban’s Hungary, they at least share political real estate. It is somewhere in the center, and the center is not holding.
As for Elena, her performative populism might recall Eva Perón; her brutality to opponents, Vladimir Putin; the father-daughter legacy, France’s rightist Marine Le Pen. But more broadly, her entertainer-in-chief persona and sublime lunacy speak to a world in which political movements can be both ridiculous and deadly, in which authoritarianism can wear the grease-painted face of a terrifying clown.
The real-life overtones may not be funny, but the execution is. The Iannucci-esque insults rain like hailstones: Elena dismisses a visiting American senator (Martha Plimpton) as “some frequent-flier corn shucker” — that last word is a deliberate typo — “from the farm states.” The directors, Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs, feast on images like the mold-phobic Elena being born in a hermetically sealed transparent litter. Alexandre Desplat’s theme music is fit for a dystopian circus.
The costume design, by Consolata Boyle, speaks almost as loudly as the script. Elena’s outfits — a kind of Alpine-totalitarian chic — convey sexuality intertwined with fearsomeness. Agnes spends the series sheathed in a drab, severe outfit that effaces her as a person, couture from the House of Orwell. (Though Winslet’s performance, like her character, monopolizes attention, Riseborough is quietly terrific.)
Throughout the six episodes, “The Regime” is especially attentive to what it means when the strongman in the story is a woman. It changes the conversation, the source and the expression of power, the mythmaking, the language and the insults. Elena frames her addresses to the public as a kind of twisted romance. “What has become of our love?” she asks when unrest breaks out; when her belligerent foreign policy leads to economic blowback, she declares, “Our love cannot be sanctioned.”
Her performance is magnetic; the satire less confident. The story hurtles through a year of chaos, and the ride turns shakier when the tone shifts to straight dramatic thriller. The series feels leery of engaging with the ugly, xenophobic aspects of modern autocracy. It is more comfortable as the story of a demented ruler than a depraved ideology. But a generic political critique — it’s bad to be power-hungry — isn’t an interesting one.
Ultimately, “The Regime” is a kind of twisted love story, as history sometimes ends up being. And for some romantics and their unfortunate subjects, love is a battlefield.