Movie Review – Fackham Hall
Principal Cast : Thomasin McKenzie, Ben Radcliffe, Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Emma Laird, Lizzie Hopley, Tom Felton, Tom Goodman-Hill, Anna Maxwell Martin, Sue Johnston, Jason Done, Tim McMullan, Ramon Tikaram, John Thompson, Ian Bartholomew, Karen Henthorn, Jimmy Carr, Adam Woodward, Nathan McMullen.
Synopsis: A new porter forms an odd bond with the youngest daughter of a well-known UK family. As the Davenport family, headed by Lord and Lady Davenport, deals with the epic disaster of the wedding of their eldest daughter to her caddish cousin.
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It’s been an age since I’ve genuinely enjoyed an outright slapstick satire quite the way I laughed my arse off watching Fackham Hall, a very British piss-take on the period drama genre popularised by the likes of Downton Abbey and its stiff-upper-lipped ilk. Written by British sketch comedy veterans the Dawson Brothers (Steve and Andrew Dawson, alongside Tim Inman), with additional scripting from none other than Jimmy Carr and his brother Patrick, Fackham Hall operates on an aggressively high joke-per-minute ratio. Crucially, the success rate is impressive: this thing actually lands its gags, with a consistency that makes what could easily have been a smug, self-satisfied spoof into a genuinely riotous piece of work. You don’t need to have watched every episode of Downton Abbey, nor possess a working knowledge of Upstairs, Downstairs, to be in on the joke here. Class warfare and incest have always been a rich seam for British comedy, and Fackham Hall understands that brief implicitly, nailing it with gleeful precision.
Set largely within the venerable but increasingly imperilled walls of its ancestral estate, Fackham Hall follows the aristocratic Davenport family as they confront questions of lineage, marriage and social survival when it becomes clear that Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis) has no direct male heir. A strategically convenient wedding is arranged between daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) and their insufferably entitled cousin Archibald (Tom Felton), designed to keep the estate firmly within the family. Matters are complicated by the arrival of Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), a quick-witted orphan and petty thief who is mistakenly taken on as a hall boy, while unspoken rivalries and simmering romantic tensions quietly infect both the upstairs and downstairs inhabitants. As preparations for the wedding gather pace, affections shift, class boundaries blur, and an unexpected death draws Inspector Watt (Tom Goodman-Hill) to Fackham Hall, casting suspicion across family members, servants and guests alike. Anchored by Thomasin McKenzie as Rose Davenport and Katherine Waterston as the formidable Lady Davenport, the film gleefully skewers period melodrama and murder mystery conventions, layering farce, romance and escalating absurdity without tipping its hand as to where loyalties, inheritances or hearts might ultimately land.
Watching Fackham Hall, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Leslie Nielsen would have absolutely adored this film. It is unapologetically torn from the same cloth as The Naked Gun and Flying High!: the world is dumb, the people inhabiting it are even dumber, and yet everything is played entirely straight. There’s no mugging for the audience, no telegraphing of punchlines. Ben Radcliffe’s Eric Noone is handsome, earnest and heroically oblivious; Jimmy Carr’s church bishop is a walking monument to ecclesiastical pomposity; Damian Lewis and Katherine Waterston play their aristocratic inbreds as foppish, wilfully ignorant idiots; and Tom Felton’s snivelling, entitled would-be Lord is a magnificent exercise in comic loathsomeness. Fackham Hall is packed to the rafters with recognisable archetypes and clichés from the British period drama playbook, all of them skewered through a sharp mix of razor-edged dialogue and broad, absurdist physical comedy. Remarkably, almost all of it works.
As a long-time fan of British comedy, I found Fackham Hall an absolute treat. If I had to single out one element that pushed the film from very funny to deliriously inspired, it would be the recurring gag involving legendary author J.R.R. Tolkien, portrayed by Jason Done with an unwaveringly straight face. It’s a deeply silly idea, milked for maximum comic effect through repetition and deadpan escalation, and it had me howling every single time it resurfaced. Droll doesn’t begin to cover it.
Farce of this stripe lives or dies on whether the audience is willing to fully buy into the absurdity of its premise. Fackham Hall succeeds because it never once undermines that buy-in. The film tips its hat lovingly to Britain’s entrenched class divisions and social absurdities, but it relies heavily on a cast capable of delivering these performances without a single conspiratorial wink at the camera. This is something even Leslie Nielsen himself drifted away from later in his career, and its absence here is part of the film’s secret weapon. Damian Lewis, in particular, is pitch-perfect as Lord Davenport: ineffectual, proudly anti-intellectual and utterly divorced from reality. His performance alone would justify the price of admission, but the ensemble around him is firing on all cylinders.
The script is riddled with throwaway non-sequitur jokes, muttered asides and stage-whispered punchlines, many of them laser-targeted at the tropes of the genre being lampooned. Several gags are so perfectly timed they left me clutching at my sides. Not everything lands, and some of the plot turns are, frankly, laughably dumb — even by the generous standards of a deliberately “dumb” satire — but the film barely gives you time to register a misfire before another joke barrels in and wipes the slate clean. Special credit is due to Radcliffe and Thomasin McKenzie, whose performances anchor the film’s romantic through-line with genuine warmth and sincerity. Managing to play befuddled, oblivious characters inside a heightened satire without collapsing into parody is no small feat, yet both actors pull it off with ease, lending the film an emotional spine that keeps the farce buoyant rather than weightless.
I’m reluctant to get any more specific in discussing Fackham Hall, for fear of spoiling a particularly good gag or revealing a plot beat best discovered organically. Suffice it to say, this is a splendid piece of British satire that absolutely nails the crass, bawdy absurdity of high-concept period drama. Director Jim O’Hanlon balances intellectual wit and puerile slapstick with a dead-eye confidence that keeps the film sharp rather than scattershot. I had an absolute blast. The trailers admittedly give away more than they should, so if you’ve managed to avoid them, I’d recommend going in cold. It takes a moment to find its rhythm, but once it clicks, it clicks beautifully. In an increasingly grim political landscape, Fackham Hall is a perfect antidote: rude, clever, and very, very funny.
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