The silliest film of the year, FACKHAM HALL is a carry on romp part Downton Abbey, part upper class murder mystery, done with aplomb, and a tongue in both cheeks.
Incest is best as FACKHAM HALL follows lovable pick-pocket Eric Noone as he lands a job at a unique English manor house. He quickly rises through the ranks, and a forbidden romance with lady-of-the-house Rose Davenport blossoms. But when an unexpected murder occurs, Eric gets framed – leaving Rose and her family’s future perilously uncertain.
Upstairs, downstairs, in m’lady’s chamber pots, kissin’ cousins, frets and frots, landed genitals, sado Marxism and the Oedipus Contest, Herculian pirouettes and missed marbles, FACKHAM HALL has it all, pot shots at political correctness and bullseyes on the arid aristocracy.
All cast stars in this cliché crunching comedy of arrears, with Thomasin McKenzie wonderfully wacky as young Rose, eldest daughter of the Davenport dynasty.
Damien Lewis is superb as Lord Davenport, an avuncular dad, which seems about right in an inbred household. Katherine Waterson plays his wife Prudence to a high T.
Tim Felton is finely foul as Rose’s arranged ascendancy intended and Ben Radcliff is a cocky, cocksure Eric
Economic and sexual farce couples in a jocular strap in a script originated by Jimmy and Patrick Carr, with Jimmy playing the part of a vicar whose problems with punctuation puts commas in a coma and full stops into periods.
With a guest list that includes Lord Luchan, Lady Gaga and J RR Tolkien, FACKHAM HALL is scandalously silly, colonised with anachronism and gleeful absurdism. Puns run, sight gags steal scenes that cannot be unseen, and there’s a paucity of pauses unheard of.
Pastiche unleashed, FACKHAM HALL is a celebration of consanguinity, of twit tradition, of crass materialism and the tropes that feed parody and homage.
A take-off that lands.
