Provided are a facial expression recognition method and system combined with an attention mechanism. The method comprises: detecting faces comprised in each video frame in a video sequence, and extracting corresponding facial ROIs, so as to obtain facial pictures in each video frame; aligning the facial pictures in each video frame on the basis of location information of facial feature points of the facial pictures; inputting the aligned facial pictures into a residual neural network, and extracting spatial features of facial expressions corresponding to the facial pictures; inputting the spatial features of the facial expressions into a hybrid attention module to acquire fused features of the facial expressions; inputting the fused features of the facial expressions into a gated recurrent unit, and extracting temporal features of the facial expressions; and inputting the temporal features of the facial expressions into a fully connected layer, and classifying and recognizing the facial expressions.