Fackham Hall
It’s upstairs, downstairs in Jimmy Carr’s slapstick salute to Julian Fellowes.
Meet the Fackers: Thomasin McKenzie, Katherine Waterston, Damian Lewis, and Tom Felton
Image courtesy of Bleecker Street.
by CHAD KENNERK
The big-screen spoof is back. At least in form, if not entirely in function. At the height of the parody film, championed by filmmakers such as Mel Brooks and ‘ZAZ’ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker), the subgenre meant big bucks at the box office. Until recently, that breed of movie was all but extinct. Paramount revived its Naked Gun franchise in 2025 to mixed results. The humour was geared toward millennials, an audience demo that grew up with parody and who could identify with Drebin’s anxiety over losing Buffy the Vampire Slayer when his TiVo connected to the internet. Of course, comedy is subjective, and no two funny bones are entirely alike. Once typified by the likes of Airplane!, the spoof is a hard craft to land in today’s fractured culture. With Downton Abbey having just delivered its cinematic coda, Fackham Hall delivers an apt look at the upper crust of British period dramas.
At a respectable English estate near Ricki Lake and the Phoebewaller Bridge, led by the privileged Lord (Damian Lewis) and Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston), the family is preoccupied with seeking a male heir to save the beloved hall. When daughter Poppy Davenport (Emma Laird) leaves first cousin Archibald (Tom Felton) at the altar in order to run off with the local manure spreader, all eyes turn to the Lady Rose Davenport (Thomasin McKenzie), who has her own eyes on pickpocket-turned-hall-boy Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe). Sue Johnston ironically fills the shoes of the family matriarch (she was in servitude to Dame Maggie on Downton) and none other than screen legend Hayley Mills provides the narration (à la Julie Andrews in Bridgerton.)
From the moment the camera first lingers on the big house — where the estate gate reads ‘Incestus ad Infinitum’ — the jokes arrive a mile a minute. There are some genuine verbal and visual chuckles, like the Trainspotting poster seen in the servant quarters and the gleeful singalong of a Noël Coward-esque ‘I Went to the Palace with My Willy Hanging Out’. There are in fact so many jokes crammed inside Fackham Hall that the place feels a little crowded. Carr and company manage to capture some of Downton’s soapy essence but seem to have missed a majority of the episodes, especially when Fackham’s narrative suddenly goes Knives Out into an Agatha Christie murder mystery. The cast gives it their all, playing the hijinks to the hilt and with all the necessary seriousness for this brand of farce. Unfortunately most of the recurring gags are worn paper thin by the time the credits roll. Marketing delivered a real banger on Instagram with images of a fake ‘bangers and mash’ phallic popcorn bucket, a play on Dune: Part Two’s infamous popcorn orifice.
Cast: Thomasin McKenzie, Ben Radcliffe, Katherine Waterston, Emma Laird, Tom Goodman-Hill, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sue Johnston, Tom Felton, Damian Lewis, Hayley Mills.
Dir Jim O'Hanlon, Pro Danny Perkins, Kris Thykier, Mila Cottray, Screenplay Steve Dawson, Andrew Dawson, Tim Inman, Jimmy Carr, Patrick Carr, Ph Philipp Blaubach, Ed Colin Fair, Music David Arnold, Oli Julian, Costumes Rosalind Ebbutt, Sound Glen Gathard.
Elysian Film Group/Archery Pictures/Two & Two Pictures-Bleecker Street (US), Entertainment Film Distributors (UK)
97 mins. UK/USA. 2025. US Rel: 5 December 2025. UK Rel: 12 December 2025. Cert. R (US), 15 (UK).
