The Regime review: Not even the great Kate Winslet can rescue this forgettable satire

It’s Kate Winslet’s third miniseries for HBO after her sensational, Emmy-winning performances in Mildred Pierce (2011) and Mare of Easttown (2021).

Sitting in the director’s chair is the brilliantly versatile Stephen Frears. Incidentally, this is the project he was working on in Vienna when he was the subject of an entertaining Imagine... programme last year.​

It’s created and written by Will Tracy, one of the scriptwriters on Succession. Last but not least, the supporting and guest star roles are filled by an exceptional line-up of mostly British, Irish and American actors, including Hugh Grant, Andrea Riseborough, Julia Davis, Rory Keenan, Stanley Townsend and Martha Plimpton.

With this calibre of talent involved, what could possibly go wrong? Try just about everything. Anyone can have an off day. In The Regime, which is supposed to be a political satire, everyone seems to be having their off day at the same time.

'The Regime' Trailer

Winslet can do comedy as well as she does drama. We’ve known this since her hilarious appearance in Extras all those years ago. It’s regarded as one of the best episodes, and rightly so.

Dressed in a nun’s costume and playing an exaggerated version of herself, Winslet demonstrated how to talk dirty on the phone, and later shared a surefire tip for winning an Oscar: do a Holocaust drama (ironically, she’d go on to win an Oscar for Holocaust drama The Reader).

To be fair, she gives it her all in The Regime, throwing herself with determinedly hammy abandon into the role of Chancellor Elena Vernham, the autocratic ruler of a nameless fictional country somewhere in, as a caption tells us, “Middle Europe”.

The vagueness of the location allows Winslet to deliver her lines in a cut-glass English accent, which she does while making her bottom lip droop weirdly to the left.

Everyone else, including her Belgian co-star Matthias Schoenaerts, speaks in whatever manner comes naturally to them.

Elena is as much crackpot as tinpot. She’s a hypochondriac and has become fixated on a non-existent mould she believes is creeping through her palace. Imagining its spores are infiltrating her lungs and that she’s destined to succumb to the long disease that killed her father, Elena keeps humidifiers running around the clock.

She refuses to shake hands with anyone, not even the visiting American politicians who are keen for the US to get a slice of the country’s sole industry: cobalt mining.

When Elena is not having one of her sessions in an oxygen tent or being carried around the place by servants in what looks like a chaise longue with a hermetically-sealed cover, she’s conversing with her dead father.

She keeps his corpse stored, Lenin-style, in a glass coffin in the basement. As you’d expect, he’s started to go off a bit. “Daddy, you’ve got spots now,” she tells him.

With this calibre of talent, what could possibly go wrong? Try everything

Locked in a cell in another area of the basement — although he won’t be appearing for a few episodes yet — is the aforementioned Hugh Grant as the previous chancellor, Elena’s old political foe Edward Keplinger, who the public believe has suffered a fate no worse than exile to a life of comfort in the countryside.

Thrown into the middle of this madness is Schoenaerts as Herbert Zubak, a brutish, disgraced army corporal who earned the nickname “Butcher” after he slaughtered a group of miners.

He’s given the highly important job of walking a couple of feet in front of Elena, waving a moisture-measuring meter around. They develop feelings for one another, much to the chagrin of Elena’s French husband Nicholas (Guillaume Gallienne) and the underlings jockeying for position.

The Regime, which has a whiff of Wes Anderson wackiness (never a good thing), is a peculiar beast: a satire that doesn’t seem sure what it’s satirising. It never gets beyond the idea that power corrupts and all dictators eventually go nuts.

The only funny moment is when Elena tunelessly warbles Chicago’s If You Leave Me Now to a roomful of embarrassed bootlickers.

A rare misfire for Winslet that you’ve virtually forgotten about as soon as it’s over.