Echoes of folk horror films, The Babadook and even Under the Skin weave through Benjamin Barfoot’s chilling study of the denial that often follows the sudden loss of a loved one. When someone we care about dies unexpectedly in something like a car accident, reality is fractured — an idea the horror genre has relied on for years. There’s a whole subgenre, especially lately, of what might be called “grief horror,” but Barfoot avoids the pitfalls of this classification by valuing imagery over explanation, resulting in a film that may confuse some people but haunts them nonetheless.
Young Robert Turnbull is excellent as Isaac, a boy grieving the unimaginable loss of his father James (Charles Aitken), shortly after losing his mother. Now an orphan, he’s essentially left to fend for himself in a home deep in the countryside with a stepmother named Laura (Julia Brown), who makes it clear she never planned to be a single mother. She fell in love with a man and embraced her role as a stepmother, but now everything has changed and she’s unsure if she wants to be Isaac’s legal guardian, considering giving him up to the state and living in foster care. She drinks to numb the pain and turns to a divorced friend named Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White) for solace.
Into this emotionally damaged landscape falls something impossible, perhaps literally. With smoke in the woods and lights at night, there is a “Daddy’s Head” reading that what happens to James and Laura is of a strange nature, but one of the reasons I admire the film is its refusal to connect all the dots. Suffice it to say that Laura and Isaac return from James’ funeral to find something Under the table, he leaves the room and goes through a window into the miles of menacing forest that surrounds them.
Laura assumes it’s an animal, but Isaac starts seeing this dark creature in the most unexpected places, including an air conditioning vent in his bedroom in the film’s scariest sequence, and they all find what appears to be a witch’s house in the woods, adding to the fabulous/folkloric aspects of the Barfoot story. Thousands of years of storytelling make it clear that nothing good lives in a place like that, but Isaac refuses to give up on his investigation for one important reason: whatever this thing is, it has Daddy’s head.
The lengths we go to (or the denial we’re willing to accept) to spend more time with a deceased loved one has been a core theme of horror from the beginning. What is the price to pay for reversing death? Barfoot plays with this theme in a way that feels emotionally raw, ably assisted by great performances from Turnbull and Brown. Young Isaac elicits our empathy for his plight without ever resorting to melodrama, and sells the mix of terror and hope that has taken hold of his character. He knows this isn’t right. But he’s a dad! And Brown conveys the weight of grief at her new responsibility as a mother, further distorted when she begins to suspect Isaac may be hiding a murderous secret.
Clearly, there’s a lot to unpack in “Daddy’s Head,” but it all works mostly because of Barfoot’s oversight of the film’s sharp technical elements, including the fantastic production design, cinematography, and editing. While I would have liked it to have had one or two fewer scares and a bit more computer special effects, what works here is the overall mood of the film more than individual moments. Most effectively, Barfoot and his team turn this cold, remote estate into a character; returning to it doesn’t provide any of the standard warmth of a happy home. We can feel the chill in the air. And he uses recurring imagery well, often employing circles and straight lines that make the random fluidity of the monster and his home feel more anarchic and menacing. It doesn’t. belong in this space. Even if it has dad’s head.
This review was featured during the world premiere at Fantastic Fest. It premieres on Shudder on October 11.He.