Review: Fackham Hall – Estate of affairs

Directed by Jim O’Hanlon
Starring Thomasin McKenzie, Damian Lewis, Katherine Waterston, Jimmy Carr

7.5/10

British humour has quite the reputation of being so incredibly witty, incisively satirical, and so clever it can make you feel smarter by watching it. Fackham Hall is not quite that. This new British comedy takes more of its inspiration from the crass and joke-filled American comedies of the ‘80s, the parodies of the Zucker brothers (Airplane, Naked Gun), and applies it to the classic British genre—the aristocratic romance.

The patriarch of Fackham Hall, Lord Humphrey Davenport (Damian Lewis), is anxious that he has no male heir to inherit their estate after things go awry at the wedding of his daughter Poppy (Emma Laird) and Archibald (Tom Felton). Lord Davenport and his wife, Lady Prudence (Katherine Waterston), try getting their other daughter Rose (Thomasin McKenzie) to marry him, but she is instead attracted to the lowly hall boy Eric (Ben Radcliffe). When Lord Davenport ends up murdered in his own office, everyone is a suspect, as Inspector Watt (Tom Goodman-Hill) is tasked to catch the culprit.

The first three jokes here are sight gags, involving incest, masturbation, and marijuana—if this seems too sophisticated for you, Fackham Hall may not be your cup of tea. It’s filled to the brim (at least in the first half) with all kinds of these incredibly silly jokes, bawdy one-liners, and ridiculous sight gags. But this makes some of the more clever jokes even more surprising, as the film can shift itself into slightly more highbrow material, with some jokes referencing the Bechtel test or the author Honoré de Balzac (you can just about see what the joke is here).

This could’ve easily been a strong contender for funniest film of the year already, but the second half is a real let-down compared to the first, where before the jokes were flying one after the other with hardly any space between them, but now the jokes are few and far between as the film feels the need to actually spend time finishing its story. This shows one failure this film has as a comedy: that it struggles to place jokes in and around its story, something that many of the greatest comedies are able to do.

Fackham Hall was co-written by Jimmy Carr, who also appears as a vicar in this—I’m sure you can imagine what kind of offensive angle they take on making fun of the church, but the way the film words them and Carr performs them is actually fairly clever. If you are indeed a fan of the rude and crude from Jimmy Carr’s stand-up, this film may very likely be up your alley. It feels like the parody films have been extinct for quite some time from the cinemas (the folks behind Epic Movie are likely to blame), but it’s great to see The Naked Gun reboot retain all the hilarious DNA of the original, and now the Brits too have joined in with a comedy film that’s absolute primary goal is just to make you laugh.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN