Fackham Hall

Rating 8/10

The smartest parodies reward familiarity without requiring it.  They rest on wit, style, and a commitment to the joke.  Fackham Hall delivers all three.

The Davenport family scrambles to secure their lineage.  There is no male heir.  So, daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) is nudged toward an arranged marriage.  Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) believes the only solution is to enter into a union with their pompous cousin, Archibald (Tom Felton), to keep the property in the family.  Into this world wanders Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), a good-natured orphan and petty thief.  He arrives at Fackham Hall with a message for Lord Davenport (Damian Lewis), but the staff mistake him for a lowly hall boy.  Before he can correct them, he’s swept up into the household.  Eric and Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), the family’s overlooked younger daughter, are drawn to each other.  Meanwhile, Poppy is preparing to marry Archibald, though her heart clearly isn’t in it.  A sudden death throws the estate into chaos.  A blustering inspector (Tom Goodman-Hill) arrives, gathers the wedding guests, and launches a full investigation to find the culprit.

Fackham Hall is a gleefully ridiculous spoof of polished British period dramas.  These are the stately epics in which aristocrats and servants intermingle, and decorum is treated like a sacred sport.  Given its timing, it is clearly riffing on the PBS series Downton Abbey, produced for ITV in the UK, but the genre’s roots run deep.  Long before the Crawleys, series such as Upstairs, Downstairs, Brideshead Revisited, and films like Gosford Park set the stage for Downton‘s eventual domination.

The beauty of this comedy is how little knowledge of that matters.  I have never seen an episode of Downton, not one, and I still had no trouble understanding its rhythms.  And why not?    You don’t need to be a Star Trek fan to enjoy Galaxy Quest or a Bond expert to laugh at Austin Powers.  Likewise, a degree in class-bound British household dramas is unnecessary.  Just bring a sense of humor.

Director Jim O’Hanlon is a filmmaker with a varied background in British film and television (including Trying and Catastrophe).  Here he teams with an eclectic writing group led by stand-up comic Jimmy Carr, his brother Patrick Carr, and the longtime sketch-comedy trio The Dawson Bros. (Steve Dawson, Andrew Dawson, and Tim Inman).  Their sensibility feels directly indebted to the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker tradition.  The rapid wordplay of Airplane! and the deadpan lunacy of The Naked Gun are all here.  That offbeat absurdity amidst period-drama sincerity is total.  You can feel their influence.

This is the kind of production that demands repeat viewings.  There are so many jokes that you cannot possibly catch them all.  A running gag in which the aristocracy never lifts a finger means the butler literally holds Lord Davenport’s drink.  A mundane chore where servants chop herbs evolves into something far less culinary.  My favorite bit involves a priest who recites a long, wandering monologue during a wedding ceremony.  Even the estate’s name, when spoken with a crisp British accent, sounds like something not meant for polite conversation.  These are but a few.  There are hundreds, and the impressive thing is how many of them are genuinely funny.  It is December, and this now carries weight: Fackham Hall is the funniest movie of 2025.

12-09-25