Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (January 21, 2026)
After 15 years on TV and in movie theaters, Downton Abbey came to an end in 2025. As a form of epitaph, that same year brought Fackham Hall, a spoof of Downton.
Set in the early 1930s, the aristocratic Davenport clan owns stately Fackham Hall. All the clan’s male heirs died in various tragedies so that leaves daughters Poppy (Emma Laird) and Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) with the “responsibility” to marry into money.
When Poppy leaves Archibald (Tom Felton) – also her cousin - at the altar, Lord (Damian Lewis) and Lady Davenport (Katherine Waterston) pressure Rose to wed him. However, Rose falls in love with new hall boy – and also thief/orphan – Eric Noone (Ben Radcliffe), an affair that complicates matters.
Though movie parodies filled multiplexes during the first part of the 2000s, the genre faded quite a bit. Not that we got no entries in that format, but we lost the seemingly endless onslaught of that prior era.
Hall seems unlikely to revive this kind of comedy. With a worldwide gross of under $3 million, it made no impact with audiences.
Which I can’t say came as a surprise. For one, Downton Abbey seemed like more of a “hot property” in the 2010s, so the subject matter comes across as stale in the mid-2020s.
Also, Downton just doesn’t seem like a subject for parody that would attract a broad audience. Even at its popular peak, it didn’t become something that went beyond a large cult.
This means a late 2025 parody of Downton felt like a case of striking when the iron’s cold. Too many other sources already spoofed Downton anyway, with a 2019 Saturday Night Live clip as a favorite.
While this makes Downton seem like a weird choice to make the focus of a late 2025 comedy, Hall does manage some amusement. No one will forget the great Mel Brooks romps of the 1970s, but at least Hall fares better than atrocious flicks like the Scary Movie franchise or even worse projects like Date Movie.
Hall exists mainly as a throwback to Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker (ZAZ) flicks like Airplane! and others. In that regard, Hall enjoyed some competition, as Akiva Shaffer’s summer 2025 reboot of the ZAZ Naked Gun franchise arrived first.
We get the same vibe found in those ZAZ movies. Indeed, at times Hall veers more into ripoff than homage, as the film literally reuses gags from the ZAZ ouevre.
While this makes Hall feel less than original, at least it avoids the cheap and witless nature of those 2000s parodies. They tended to simply take scenes from other movies and give them a minor twist.
These flicks existed more as “recognition comedy”. The sad, unfortunate souls who laughed did so because they recognized the source material being mocked, not because the filmmakers managed to do anything creative.
Because Hall sticks pretty strictly with Downton as its topic, it doesn’t cast such a broad net. It also doesn’t directly spoof famous movie scenes ala Scary Movie and its ilk, as it tries to generate laughs as a genre parody above all else.
To some degree, it succeeds, though I can’t call Hall a laugh riot – or even a flick that generates more than the occasional chuckle. Still, given the low bar set by this genre, it goes down more painlessly than I feared.
On the negative side, we get far too many jokes based on farts and bodily humor. These seem trite and without cleverness.
We also locate bits that the filmmakers beat into the ground. For instance, when we learn what happened to the male Davenport heirs, we get a Beatles allusion.
This works fine in the moment, but Hall doesn’t know when to quit. We get more gags based in the same theme, and these bits don’t become funnier with repetition.
On the more positive side, Hall captures the Downton vibe well, and the actors all play matters fairly straight. While they “go big” at times, they largely portray the characters ala their Downton inspirations.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration, as most of the performances veer more comedic than anything we’d find in Downton. Nonetheless, no one swings for the fences, and the manner in which they keep things fairly restrained helps the movie.
In the end, I find it hard to recommend Hall, as it never turns into anything memorable. That said, it fares better than expected and folks with a fondness for the ZAZ style should enjoy it.
