'Fackham Hall' Review: A Gloriously Silly Naked Gun-style Spoof of Stuffy British Period-Dramas
- Dec 17, 2025
- 3 min read
By Dan Bremner - December 17, 2025
It’s genuinely nice to see the parody genre crawling back out of the grave after years of being declared clinically dead. With The Naked Gun reboot earlier this year being far better than it had any right to be, Scary Movie limping back next year, and now Fackham Hall taking aim at the suffocatingly self-serious British period drama, it feels like audiences are finally ready to laugh at things again. Co-Written by Jimmy Carr, this is a broad, stupid, unapologetically silly spoof of Downton Abbey–style heritage TV, and while it doesn’t always know when to stop, it delivers a consistent enough barrage of jokes to make it an easy, fun watch.
The film’s biggest strength is its sheer commitment to the bit. Every inch of the production is pitched at maximum parody, from the overly polished stately home interiors to the absurdly heightened class dynamics and melodramatic glances into the middle distance. The jokes come thick and fast: visual gags, dumb wordplay, anachronisms, slapstick, bodily humour, and knowingly terrible puns delivered with absolute conviction. It’s very much operating in the Airplane!/The Naked Gun school of comedy, where the density of jokes matters more than whether every single one lands. Not all of them do, but enough hits that you’re rarely sitting there in silence. It was genuinely great to watch this with a surprisingly busy crowd who were into it, an experience that can't be copied had it been dumped straight and buried on Sky Cinema or wherever.
The cast are clearly having a great time and, crucially, are fully game for the nonsense. Thomasin McKenzie leans hard into wide-eyed sincerity, Ben Radcliffe plays the earnest idiot perfectly, and Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Anna Maxwell Martin, Tom Felton and others throw themselves into the aristocratic absurdity without a hint of embarrassment. That level of buy-in is essential for this kind of comedy, and it elevates material that could easily fall flat if played with irony or restraint. No one here is trying to be cleverer than the joke, which is exactly the right approach.
There’s also something very satisfying about seeing British class worship dismantled through pure stupidity. The film skewers the reverence usually afforded to these worlds, exposing how inherently ridiculous the upstairs-downstairs dynamic is when stripped of prestige lighting and mournful piano scores. Jimmy Carr’s voice is unmistakable in the writing, particularly in the sharp wordplay and cruel one-liners, but it’s deployed more playfully than cynically here, which works in the film’s favour.
The only real problem with Fackham Hall is that it simply doesn’t know when to quit. The relentless rapid-fire structure becomes exhausting at times, with certain gags repeated just enough to dull their impact. Despite a fairly lean 97-minute runtime, there are stretches where you can feel the film starting to spin its wheels, hammering the same joke variations until they lose their bite. A tighter 85–90 minute cut would probably have helped keep the energy sharper all the way through.
Still, it’s to the film’s credit that it wraps things up just before it becomes genuinely tiresome. It never fully collapses under its own excess, and there’s usually another dumb visual gag or throwaway line around the corner to pull it back. This isn’t a spoof that’s going to be endlessly rewatchable in the way the absolute classics are, but it’s a solid, crowd-pleasing entry that understands exactly what it is and doesn’t pretend otherwise. I can only hope the next step for the spoof genre finally gives us the Poirot/Knives Out style spoof we deserve.
Fackham Hall won’t convert anyone who already hates spoof comedy, and it definitely outstays its welcome by a few minutes, but as a broad, silly, relentlessly stupid satire of British period dramas, it mostly does the job. A fun, disposable cinema watch that proves parody still has a pulse, even if it’s occasionally not landing the punchline.
'Fackham Hall' is out now in UK cinemas.
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