Coup!

This movie opens with views of a manual typewriter, and indignant words being spelled out letter by letter. The time and place of this new movie co-directed by Austin Stark and Joseph Schuman, who also wrote the screenplay, becomes clear. It’s the United States in 1918, and the Spanish Flu is making its way to its shores. We soon see some vintage (fictional) headlines, including “Wear a mask or go to jail.” Oh dear. Is this period film aspiring to be a parable of Our Own Time?

Kinda sorta not really. Although the milieu of “Coup!” speaks allegorically to the pandemic of our own century, it does so softly; the movie is ultimately more a tale of class warfare than public health. The writer of the indignant words — among them “Immigrants and outsiders, colored and voiceless, demand closures!” — is newspaper columnist J.C. Horton (Billy Magnusson), who presides over a kingdom by the sea while writing breathless accounts of urban riots that he pretends to have been present at. His journalistic work, of course, does not fund his lavish estate; there’s a reference to his father having been a meat magnate and to J.C.’s muckraking having exposed his poor practices.