Downton Abbey: A New Era, review: plenty of surprises and an iconic moment to savour

As last words go, they’re almost Wildean. Fixing her snivelling lady’s maid with a stare, the dowager Countess of Grantham puffs out one final poison dart – “Stop that noise, I can’t hear myself die” – before serenely slumping on the duvet.

In the first Downton Abbey film, released in 2019, it was revealed that Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith) – a steady, ever-sniping presence through 47 episodes and five Christmas specials of the globally popular luxury soap opera – was, for nonspecific medical reasons, not long for this world. So perhaps it’s inevitable that in this second feature-length spin-off, the time finally comes to break out the black armbands, lay a wreath and lob a flaming torch into the longboat.

Does it signal an end to the Downton Abbey story entirely? Probably not: the new film’s subtitle, A New Era, suggests its writer and creator Julian Fellowes sees the next generation of Crawleys as a dramatically intriguing prospect. But since it entails the death of the show’s defining and most beloved character – sorry Hugh Bonneville, Michelle Dockery, and the other 50-odd co-leads, but you know it’s true – “End of an Era” would have surely been more apt.

Yet even so, Smith’s vinegar-tongued matriarch has a few surprises in her yet. As the film begins, we discover that shortly before her son Lord Grantham (Bonneville) came along, the young Violet apparently spent a memorable summer in Toulon with a dashing Marquis, who was so smitten that he left the dowager his coastal villa in his will. The Marquis’s unimpressed widow (Nathalie Baye) is planning to take the Crawleys to court before moving out, so Grantham leads an enormous deputation to the French Riviera to smooth things over.

Meanwhile, his daughter Lady Mary (Dockery) remains at Downton to oversee the filming of a motion picture at the house – a necessary indignity, since funds are urgently required to repair the leaking roof.

Much winky harrumphing ensues due to this: yes, a Downton film might be frightfully gauche, but the money was just too good to turn down.

“I’d be better off out of it, if this is what we’ve come to,” splutters Jim Carter’s Mr Carson – so off he tramps on the French subplot. Meanwhile, to the excitement of the staff below stairs, in come the silent movie stars: dashing Guy Dexter (Dominic West) and platinum bombshell Myrna Dalgleish (Laura Haddock), along with a director (Hugh Dancy) who takes a shine to Lady Mary while nervously eyeing the rise of the talkies.

It’s 1928: “Abel Gance’s Napoleon was released last year,” Dancy fills us in, helpfully. But so was The Jazz Singer, and this new sound technology is threatening to render his latest creation technologically defunct before it’s even been shot.

Fellowes brazenly hijacks a core comic gambit from Singin’ in the Rain here – Haddock’s elegant starlet has the voice of a market trader, and when the production switches to sound, she requires behind-the-scenes help from someone possessed of a plummier accent. But the scenes are played with such bouncy bonhomie (there’s a fine supporting turn from Alex Macqueen as a pernickety sound engineer) that their glaring derivativeness doesn’t rankle as it might have.

Like the first Downton Abbey film, A New Era is built like easy television. Scenes are short and conversations often functional, imparting information with a series of loud clunks. But director Simon Curtis (My Week With Marilyn) manages to imbue the formula with real style and atmosphere: Downton itself bustles divertingly, while the French scenes radiate a nourishingly escapist cream and cerulean glow.

Gosford Park it isn’t – but nor is it just TV writ large. Unlike the previous Downton film, this one feels cinematically worthwhile, and never more so than in Smith’s tremendous final scenes. The 87-year-old actress is largely absent for A New Era’s central stretch, with Violet taking to her bedchamber, declaring she’d “rather eat pebbles” than watch a film crew at work. But a last bittersweet sparring session with Penelope Wilton’s Lady Merton is beautifully underplayed – with a wonderfully delicate touch, Wilton shows us she knows she’ll be lost without her – while the formal goodbye is as iconic a moment as Downton has yet produced.

“We have to be able to enter the 1930s with our heads held high,” Dockery says – another hint that further Downtons may just keep roaring down the road, Fast & Furious-style. But it’s hard to believe that any could serve as a better send-off than this.

PG cert, 125 min