Review
Fackham
Hall review – Downton Abbey spoof is fast, funny and throwaway
Period
drama parody has some decent and often smart gags and benefits from a game cast
including Damian Lewis and Thomasin McKenzie
Adrian
Horton
Fri 5 Dec
2025 23.28 CET
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/dec/05/fackham-hall-movie-review
Perhaps
it’s the feeling of end times in the air: after years of inactivity, spoofs are
making a comeback. This summer saw the resurgence of the lighthearted genre,
which at its best sends up the pretensions of overly serious genre with a
barrage of pitched cliches, sight gags and stupid-clever puns. The Naked Gun,
starring Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson in a spoof of a buddy-cop spoof,
opened to moderate box office success; the hapless rock band dialed it back up
to 11 in Spinal Tap II: The End Continues. Reboots of the horror spoof
gold-standard Scary Movie and the Mel Brooks Star Wars rip Spaceballs were
greenlit, and there were rumors of a return for international man of mystery
Austin Powers. Unserious times, it seems, beget appetite for knowingly unserious,
joke-dense, refreshingly shallow fun.
The
latest of these goofy parodies, which premieres on the beyond-parody day that
Fifa awarded Donald Trump an inaugural peace prize and Netflix announced its
plan to buy Warner Bros, is Fackham Hall, a Downton Abbey spoof that pokes at
the very pokeable pretensions of gilded British period dramas. (Yes, Fackham
rhymes with a crass kiss-off to the aristocracy.) Co-written by British Irish
comedian and TV presenter Jimmy Carr and directed by Jim O’Hanlon, Fackham Hall
has plenty of material to work with – the historical soap’s grand finale just
premiered in September, 15 years after Julian Fellowes’s series started going
upstairs-downstairs with ludicrous portent – and wastes none of it. From
ludicrous start (servants rolling joints for the household and responding to
calls from the “masturbatorium”) to ludicrous finish (someone manages to marry
a second cousin rather than a first!), this enjoyable silver-spoon romp packs
all of its 97 minutes with jokes and bits ranging from the puerile to the
genuinely funny, proving that there may yet be more to wring from eat-the-rich
satire.
Like
Downton, Fackham Hall is a pastiche of very self-important rich people and very
obsequious servants, of effete masculinity and feminine gamesmanship. What is
life as a British aristocrat, if not to drink tea and scheme others’ marriages?
Having lost their four sons in four separate tragic accidents, the feckless
Lord Davenport (an enjoyably affected Damian Lewis) and his anti-reading wife,
Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston), are left to focus on their daughters.
Poppy (Emma Laird), the younger sister, has accomplished the family goal of
finding the right first cousin to marry, lest the manor drift out of family
control. But when Poppy bails on a future of know-nothing conversation with
cousin Archibald (a perfectly smarmy Tom Felton) for a simpleton, the family’s
hopes land on the unmarried Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) – at 23, a “dried-up husk
of a woman”, according to her mother – whose belief in such things as female
autonomy leads her to detest Archibald.
Carr
fares much better joking about the suffocating expectations on early
20th-century women often mined for self-serious drama – poor Rose just wants to
read books (the scandal!) in but One Shade of Grey – than joking about women,
as in his disastrous recent standup. The trope of respectable, enviable
femininity are the stars here, and often make for the best punching bags; when
plucky pickpocket Eric Noone (the dashing Ben Radcliffe), hand-selected from
his London orphanage by a mysterious stranger to deliver a letter to Fackham,
collides into Rose, he is inevitably sidetracked by an “incredibly beautiful
woman with a kind of carefree essence that makes men grateful to be alive!”
As
befitting an intentionally ridiculous spoof, the plot is secondary to the bits,
which Carr keeps delivering at an amiably humorous clip, with a solid three
guffaws in the mix. There is a murder, and an incompetent investigation. The
forbidden romance between Noone (pronounced “no one”) and Rose, played by
Radcliffe and McKenzie as just the right balance of bumbling and beguiling,
imperils the aristocrats’ best-laid plans. Genre skewering, pratfalls and
spoof-staple wordplay abound. (“I’m here for the murder,” says the investigator
(Tom Goodman-Hill). “I’m afraid someone’s already done it! But come in anyway,”
says the butler.)
It’s all
in lighthearted fun, though that itself has limitations. The dialed-up
silliness of a spoof can wear quickly, and the mileage on this particular
variety runs out somewhere between sketch and feature. At a certain point, you
might wish to return to the world of (very slight) reason. But you have to
respect a sincere commitment to the artform – if we’re going to amuse ourselves
to death, might as well laugh at it.
Fackham
Hall is out in US cinemas now, in the UK on 12 December and in Australia on 19
February
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