Movie Review: ‘Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale’ Blu-ray

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Review by Laury Angel

If you are a Downton Abbey fan, you probably greatly anticipate Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale, but probably not in the same way fans of the Conjuring franchise were excited about The Conjuring: Last Rights. Instead of wondering whether anyone will die in a gruesome fashion, Downton fans are more concerned with a different kind of drama. More than anything else, we’re looking forward to seeing our old friends, the Crawleys and finding out what they’ve been up to.

And they’ve been up to quite a bit, it seems, but in a lot of ways, everything is the same. Lady Mary (Michelle Dockery) is at the center of scandal as a recently divorced woman, and the estate is grappling with the death of the dowager countess in the last film. While upstairs Lord Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) struggles with the idea of becoming irrelevant when Lady Mary takes over, downstairs, retirees Mr. Carson (Jim Carter) and Mrs. Patmore (Lesley Nicol) are turning their tasks over to Andy (Michael Fox) and Daisy (Sophie McShera), respectively. All the while, Lady Grantham (Elizabeth McGovern) and her brother Harold Levinson (Paul Giamatti) have to figure out what to about Harold’s bungling of their mother’s estate, and Lady Merton (Penelope Wilton) must navigate the perils of bringing progress to a festival planning committee. And, of course, they all look fabulous in beautiful period costumes.

While all of these plot threads are pressing to the characters, these problems are all very low stakes for viewers, which is part of the point of a film like this. There’s a cozy feeling, knowing everything will be wrapped up by the end, like drinking a cup of tea after a hard day. We expect to leave the theater feeling satisfied after a Downton Abbey film, and The Grand Finale does not disappoint.