Downton Abbey: A New Era (film, 2022) Starring Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, Laura Carmichael and Maggie Smith

The era of the title is the arrival of sound. The silent picture being shot at Downton is overtaken mid-production by the talkies, and the film uses that collapse for its comedy and for its one genuine piece of cruelty -  the actress whose voice ends her career.

It is also the film in which Violet Crawley dies.

Plot

1928. Tom Branson, the estate's agent and widower of the youngest Crawley daughter, marries Lucy Smith, the illegitimate daughter and sole heir of Maud Bagshaw, lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. 

At the wedding breakfast, Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, produces the family solicitor and an announcement. The late Marquis de Montmirail, whom she met in France in 1864, has left her a villa on the Mediterranean coast.

She is giving it to her great-granddaughter, Sybbie Branson(daughter of Tom Branson and Sybil Crawley), so that the child of a chauffeur will be as well provided for as her cousins. Asked why a French nobleman she knew for a few days should leave her a house, Violet declines to assist the conversation. 

At Downton, rain is coming through the roof. A film company wants to rent the house to shoot a silent picture called The Gambler, and Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham, refuses on principle until his daughter, Lady Mary Talbot, who runs the estate, points out that the fee would pay for the repairs.

The new Marquis de Montmirail invites the Crawleys to the villa. Violet is too ill to travel, so the party is Robert and Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, their daughter Lady Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham, her husband Bertie Pelham, Marquess of Hexham, Tom and Lucy Branson, and Maud Bagshaw.

Three servants go with them: Charles Carson, the retired butler, who is seasick within the hour and cannot find anything formal enough to wear in the heat, John Bates, valet to Lord Grantham, and Phyllis Baxter, lady's maid to Lady Grantham. Lady Edith, who owns a London magazine, treats the journey as an assignment.

Lady Mary remains at Downton with Elsie Carson(previously Elsie Hughes, now married to Charles Carson), the housekeeper, to manage the invasion.

The crew arrive with two stars. Guy Dexter is courteous to everyone, and Myrna Dalgleish behaves as though the servants were furniture, which the servants resent all the more for having queued to see her.

In France, the new marquis is welcoming. His mother, the dowager marchioness, is not, and disputes Violet's ownership outright, until the lawyers establish that her claim has no legal footing.

Then the marquis makes an observation to Robert. His father visited Violet in 1864, and Robert was born nine months later.

That night Cora tells her husband that she may be seriously ill and has been hiding it. Robert is left contemplating the loss of his mother, his wife, and his own name within a year.

At Downton, the studio cancels The Gambler, because silent films no longer make money. Lady Mary proposes rescuing it by dubbing dialogue over the completed footage and shooting the remainder with sound.

Guy Dexter's voice survives the transition. Myrna Dalgleish's does not, because her Cockney vowels cannot be reconciled with the duchess she is playing.

Elsie Carson suggests the obvious solution, and Lady Mary is put in front of a microphone to speak Dalgleish's lines. Dalgleish, certain she is finished, tries to walk off the picture, and it is Anna Bates, lady's maid to Lady Mary, and Daisy Parker, the assistant cook, who talk her into staying.

Joseph Molesley, the village schoolmaster and a former footman at Downton, can lip-read. He reconstructs the dialogue from the silent footage and produces the script for the dubbed version.

Guy Dexter lets Thomas Barrow, the butler, understand what they have in common, and offers him a position in Hollywood as his dresser and housekeeper.

The family comes home while filming continues. Jack Barber, the director, flirts with Lady Mary, whose husband Henry Talbot has been away for months at motor rallies, and she declines him.

Dr. Richard Clarkson examines Cora and finds pernicious anaemia, which is treatable. Cora then spends her convalescence teaching Myrna Dalgleish an American accent, which may save her career.

Lady Edith decides she has had enough of being decorative and returns to running her magazine. Daisy Parker and her husband Andy Parker, the first footman, scheme successfully to marry Beryl Patmore, the cook, to Albert Mason, Daisy's former father-in-law, chiefly in order to get a cottage to themselves.

When the extras walk out over pay, the Downton servants put on costumes and fill the ballroom themselves. Jack Barber offers Joseph Molesley a screenwriting contract, and Molesley proposes to Phyllis Baxter without noticing that a live microphone is carrying every word to the crew.

Violet, asked directly, tells her son that the late Lord Grantham was his father and that nothing happened in France. Her strength then fails, and she dies in her bed at Downton with the family and the servants around her.

Thomas Barrow resigns and leaves for California. Lady Mary asks Charles Carson to train Andy Parker as the next butler.

Months later, Tom and Lucy Branson return with Sybbie and a new baby, and a portrait of Violet Crawley is hung in the entrance hall.

Cast

• Hugh Bonneville as Robert Crawley, Earl of Grantham

  

• Elizabeth McGovern as Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham

  

• Maggie Smith as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham

  

• Michelle Dockery as Lady Mary Talbot

  

• Laura Carmichael as Edith Pelham, Marchioness of Hexham

  

• Dominic West as Guy Dexter, film actor
• Laura Haddock as Myrna Dalgleish, film actress
• Hugh Dancy as Jack Barber, film director
• Nathalie Baye as the dowager Marchioness de Montmirail
• Jonathan Zaccaï as Edouard, Marquis de Montmirail
• Jim Carter as Charles Carson, retired butler
• Phyllis Logan as Elsie Carson, housekeeper
• Robert James-Collier as Thomas Barrow, butler
• Allen Leech as Tom Branson, estate agent
• Tuppence Middleton as Lucy Branson
• Imelda Staunton as Maud Bagshaw
• Kevin Doyle as Joseph Molesley, schoolmaster
• Raquel Cassidy as Phyllis Baxter, lady's maid
• Sophie McShera as Daisy Parker, assistant cook
• Michael Fox as Andy Parker, first footman
• Lesley Nicol as Beryl Patmore, cook
• Penelope Wilton as Isobel Grey, Lady Merton

Maggie Smith's last scenes as Violet Crawley are played mostly sitting down and mostly in dialogue with her son. She keeps the timing that made the character famous almost to the end of the film, and the deathbed itself is brief, without a speech.

Laura Haddock takes the one part in the film with something real to lose. Myrna Dalgleish is rude because she is frightened, she is a working-class woman who has been coached out of nothing into stardom, and the technology arriving at Downton is about to make her unemployable.

Dominic West gives Guy Dexter an easy, practiced charm, and the scenes with Robert James-Collier are the most relaxed material Barrow has ever been given. Michelle Dockery's Lady Mary, left in charge of a film set, spends the picture negotiating with people who assume she can be flattered.

Elizabeth McGovern carries the French half, playing Cora's concealment of her illness lightly enough that her husband's panic looks like the larger event. Jim Carter has the film's broadest comedy, Carson in linen on the Riviera, appalled by garlic, heat, and foreigners in roughly that order.

Production

Simon Curtis took over as director from Michael Engler, with Julian Fellowes again writing and Gareth Neame and Liz Trubridge producing for Carnival Films. Andrew Dunn replaced Ben Smithard as cinematographer, and the budget was around $40 million.

Filming began in mid-April 2021 and finished in July, earlier than the schedule first announced, with Elizabeth McGovern posting that she had wrapped on 16 July. Highclere Castle in Hampshire was once more Downton, with the servants' quarters again on the stage at Ealing.

The villa sequences were shot on the Mediterranean coast near Toulon, which gave Donal Woods the sharpest visual contrast in the franchise: Yorkshire stone, closed windows, and tailoring against white walls, terraces, cypresses, and glare.

Turning the great hall into a film studio also let the production rebuild its own history. The crew of The Gambler work with hand-cranked cameras, arc lamps, a director's megaphone, and later a microphone dangled into the frame, and the accident that exposes Molesley's proposal comes from the sound equipment itself.

Anna Robbins designed the costumes again, with 1928 giving her the loosest silhouettes in the series: bias-cut crepe, long chiffon panels, cardigans and wide trousers in France, sun hats, and sleeveless beaded evening dresses. Myrna Dalgleish is dressed deliberately louder than the family, in harder colors and more jewelry, and the film-within-the-film gives the wardrobe a second, more theatrical register in the costume-drama scenes shot in the ballroom.

Maggie Smith was eighty-six during filming, and the script was written around a character who is failing, with Violet largely fixed in one or two rooms. Julian Fellowes chose to end her story rather than leave it unresolved, and the death was planned as the film's last movement rather than a twist.

John Lunn scored the picture, thinning the familiar theme almost to a single line for the final sequence, and the film withholds its title card until the closing credits.

Release/reception

Downton Abbey: A New Era opened in the United Kingdom on 29 April 2022 and in the United States on 20 May. It took $16 million in its American opening weekend and finished with $44.1 million in the United States and Canada and $48.5 million elsewhere, for around $92.7 million worldwide.

Reviews were slightly warmer than for the first film and no less indulgent. It holds an approval rating of 87 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, whose summary noted that the frothiness comes close to curdling, and a score of 63 on Metacritic. CinemaScore audiences again gave it an A, and 93 percent of those polled by PostTrak responded positively.

Several critics observed, accurately, that the film's problems are luxurious: a leaking roof, an inconvenient inherited villa, an unwelcome film crew, and a butler who cannot dress for warm weather. The two things audiences actually took away were the talkie sequence, which is the sharpest comic invention in either film, and Violet Crawley's death.

Maggie Smith died in September 2024, two years after the release, which turned her last scenes here into an unintended farewell in two senses. The portrait hung in the hall at the end of the film became the franchise's way of carrying her forward into Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale (2025).