Fackham Hall a Hilarious Parody of Downton Abbey

FACKHAM HALL (2025)

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon

Bleeker Street, 97 minutes, R (language, crude humor, language, innuendo)

★★★★★

 

 

 

 

Assuming you’re not one of those Downton Abbey fans that is so enamored that you can brook no criticism of it, Fackham Hall is a must-see satire. It’s a silly venture into lowbrow humor that’s akin to watching an old Henny Youngman performance, meaning that you will laugh yourself stupid despite thinking you shouldn’t. Think Downton Abbey and Upstairs Downstairs crossed with Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Airplane and you’re on the right track. You’d not be wrong to assume a backhand slap at Julian Fellowes, the aristocracy-loving British writer who reminds me of Python’s “Upper-Class Twit of the Year” sketch. I’ve not laughed so hard at a comedy film in years.

 

We meet young pickpocket Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe)–read “no one”–plying his craft on a London Street before ducking into his Catholic orphanage. A nun hands him a letter and offers him money to deliver it to Fackham Hall. After conning her into giving him a full British pound, he bicycles on his way before being smashed into by a car driven by Rose Fackham (Thomasin McKenzie). Watch how he parks his broken bike. I should mention that you should pay attention to everything in this film: things in the background, posters on the wall, road signs…. Even the video box bears the slogan, “Born to Aristocracy. Bred for Idiocy.” The gates to Fackham Hall proclaim incestus ad infinitum. One might suppose the Davenport family patriarch Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) is the dimmest bulb in the socket, but that would be shortsighted. He and his wife Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterson) are obsessed with marrying eldest daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to a cousin who’s not too closely related as to invalidate the marriage. That’s because their three sons were lost in World War I, as we find out from hilarious scrapbook clippings. Also lost was Cousin Nathaniel “who was just a boy” when he too was lost. (We see him as a child in the trenches banging grenades together!) His mother Rose (Hayley Mills!), who narrates the film has spent the years since the war as a sourpuss crank.

 

There is, naturally, house staff. The butler Cyril (Jim McMullen) is a stiff who is a spot-on sendup of Downton’s Mr. Carter, and Mrs. Edna McAllister (Anne Maxwell) sort of channels Mrs. Hughes—if she had been vaccinated with a meanness serum. The vicar (Jimmy Carr) called upon to marry Poppy to the only eligible Davenport nitwit available, Cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), comes close to stealing the comedy script and running away with it via his act of saying aloud what’s in his subconscious before correcting himself by looking at the actual words from the wedding ritual! And what’s a wedding without loads of toff guests? There is Darvish Khalid (Ramon Tikaram) who acquired a limp during the war, but not for the reasons you would think; J. R. R. Tolkien (Jason Done), who has been working on The Hobbit for many years, has learned to speak Orc, and invites everyone to call him, “J.R.R. Tolkien, the Writer;” Bill Bobaggins, who is in love with his donkey, and whose name is among the many things Tolkien appropriates; plus, more people surnamed Davenport than one can imagine. As Poppy and Archie are about to be married, Poppy runs from the church and into the arms of the man she truly loves, a cut straight out of The Graduate. He’s a (night-)soiled bum who operates the local dung wagon. (As we find out later, Archie’s one of 22 times Poppy goes to the altar without getting married!) Poppy was probably right about Archie, though; he makes Lord Humphrey look like Einstein. But Lady Davenport–think Cora Crawley– is desperate to keep Fackham Hall in the family and begins to browbeat younger daughter Rose to marry Archie. In keeping with the Downton parody, Rose is deeply in love with Eric, who plays a Tom Branson/Artful Dodger mashup.

 

Things become a sticky wicket when Lord Humphrey is indeed killed–Archie almost did so in the obligatory “hunting” scene–and Inspector Watt appears to solve the crime and provide fodder for an Abbott and Costello routine. Will all eventually be tea and cakes among the twits? This is one of my favorite five-star terrible movies!

 

Rob Weir