‘Fackham Hall’ Is a Proper Spoof That Relishes Being Improper

As a Downton Abbey fan, I can attest that there’s plenty to poke fun at in Julian Fellowes’ achingly earnest paean to post-Edwardian society. When you watch Downton, you understand you’re getting a bit of soap opera fantasy here rather than a complex history of the age. Fackham Hall leaps at the chance to poke fun at the cultural phenomenon, and the screenplay is a full-bore spoof that lacks the patience to build to a joke as much as it wants to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. While that’s a reasonable approach, it always feels like Fackham Hall’s writers went with the first joke rather than pushing themselves to find the best gag or construct a comic showcase for their stars. Instead, you get what feels like a long, slightly above-average comedy sketch. 

Inbred aristocrats, the Davenports, need to marry off one of their daughters to a cousin if they wish to keep their lavish estate, Fackham Hall. They think they’ve found a reasonable match between their daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) and her cousin Archibald (Tom Felton). This leaves their other daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), free to read books and fall for the house’s new hall boy, Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe). However, when Poppy leaves Archibald at the altar, the family scrambles to try and pair Rose and Archibald together despite the deepening affection between Eric and Rose. And then there’s a murder because the movie needs a third act and to parody Gosford Park (which Fellowes also wrote).

Since this is fully a spoof, there’s no need to get too hung up on the plot, and the story beats largely exist to move the characters between various gags. Like any respectable spoof, the film doesn’t differentiate between what kind of comedy it will deploy to get a laugh. Within the span of a few minutes, you can get a sight gag, wordplay, slapstick, and satire, and it’s nice that Fackham Hall at least has the comic dexterity to spice things up rather than leaning heavily on the easiest laugh available. The guiding ethos is to go as silly as possible, and at the film’s rapid clip, there’s never any time to lose interest.

Whether that silliness works for viewers depends on how daffy you like your comedy, but for me, Fackham Hall was able to get at least a chuckle or two every few minutes as well as a handful of big laughs. It’s never a non-stop riot, but it’s never dull either. However, it does have the misfortune of drawing a comparison to 2025’s major spoof, the reboot of The Naked Gun, and you can see that there’s much more care and cleverness in designing those jokes. While comedian Jimmy Carr and his fellow writers are taking no prisoners in their comedy, they’re also never getting quite as weird or daring as Akiva Schaffer’s movie. There’s nothing here on par with the snowman sequence or having Liam Neeson growl his affection for the Black Eyed Peas. Instead, you get a broad selection like a “Who’s on First?”-style routine with a character named Inspector Watt being confused with “What,” the dowager countess character saying lines like “Sick burn, bitch!” (a joke that’s about as tepid as a rapping granny), and then something so silly that you can kind of appreciate it, like when a friend named John shows up and says, “Please, call me JRR Tolkien, the writer.”  

Because the film is trying to cram in as many jokes as possible, it overlooks how it needs some kind of comic force to foreground the comedy rather than offloading it to the ensemble. No one here really gets to have a comic style or character beyond being dimwitted and obtuse. While admittedly a baseline for spoof characters, you can still differentiate between Ted Stryker (Robert Hays) and Dr. Rumack (Leslie Nielsen) in Airplane! even though they’re both playing the movie straight. In Fackham Hall, no one has a chance to shine, although Damian Lewis comes out the best as Lord Davenport, selling the dimwitted, faraway look of a man who’s never had to learn how to dress himself.

Fackham Hall is certainly far better than some of the atrocious spoofs Hollywood churned out after Scary Moviesuch as Date Movie, Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc., but it’s also too scattershot to leave much of an impact. Even though it’s a parody, it still needed some kind of comic voice and identity that would make it rise above the observations most moderately funny people would make if they sat down to watch Downton Abbey. As it stands, Fackham Hall serves as a mildly amusing takeoff that’s ultimately as inoffensive and lightweight as the thing it’s mocking.

Fackham Hall opens in theaters on Friday, December 5th.