FACKHAM HALL: British Buffoonery

FACKHAM HALL (Blu-ray)

2025 / 97 min

Decal Releasing

Review by Stinky the Destroyer😼

God knows such stuffy British dramas as Downton Abbey and Merchant-Ivory’s entire catalogue could use a good ribbing, which the director and team of writers (including comedian Jimmy Carr) attempt to do with Fackham Hall. 

By their very nature, parody films are a challenge to pull off successfully. For every stone cold classic like Airplane!, there are a slew of celluloid suppositories that operate on the conceit that simply shoving pop culture references and bodily functions down the viewer’s throat qualifies as satire. Speaking of the latter, are they still letting Friedberg & Seltzer make movies?

Fackham Hall lies somewhere in the middle. Though never quite as clever as Zucker, Abrahams & Zucker’s best films, it’s generally pretty funny, even though it sort of runs out of gas before the credits roll. While certainly unfolding like the period pieces it satirizes, the plot is perfunctory, a clothesline on which to hang a rapid-fire whirlwind of gags, both visual and dialogue-driven. 

The titular estate is home to the Davenports, an aristocratic family headed by their patriarch, Humphrey (Damian Lewis). With no surviving sons left (they all died in previous accidents), he arranges for daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) to marry her cousin, Archibald (Tom Felton), in order to keep the house in the family. But when she leaves Archibald at the alter, Humphrey and wife Prudence (Katherine Waterston) insist their other daughter, Rose (Thomasin McKenzie), marry him instead. However, she’s smitten with streetwise orphan pickpocket Eric (Ben Radcliffe), much to the consternation of everyone in the house (including the help).

Liberal amounts of AXE makes men irresistible.

But what am I saying? No one watching is really gonna care about the plot, even after Humphrey’s murdered and Eric’s the primary suspect. The movie’s so busy stampeding from one gag to the next that the story almost seems intrusive. Still, a lot of it works. While not above throwing in scatalogical humor and a ton of incest jokes, the dialogue is frequently funny, if not always particularly clever. Sometimes I laughed out loud, sometimes I chuckled, and occasionally, I checked to see how much more I had to sit through. But by and large, the movie’s batting average is pretty good.

Another reason Fackham Hall works as well as it does is the casting of actors not typically associated with comedy. Most look like they’d be right at home in a genuine British drama, and for the most part, everyone plays it straight. Even during the more slapsticky moments, there are no heavy-handed reminders that these characters are in on the joke.

Though probably not destined to be a comedy classic, Fackham Hall is mostly pretty amusing and one doesn’t necessarily need to be well versed in period dramas to enjoy it. It certainly looks and sounds one, but a good portion of the gags have little or nothing to do the genre it parodies. 

EXTRA KIBBLES

15 DELETED SCENES - Some are very funny, but you can see why most were cut.