DADDY'S HEAD - Mark Reviews Movies

Daddy's Head, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | October 10, 2024

Daddy's Head is about the all-enveloping nature of grief, as a young boy and his stepmother face the death of his father and her husband. However, writer/director Benjamin Barfoot's film is also a creepy and, at times, genuinely frightening horror story. These two approaches meld here, because the filmmaker knows the emotional core of both sides of this tale rests in uncertainty.

It's genuinely surprising how quickly Barfoot establishes an investment in the film's central characters. They're Isaac (Rupert Turnbull), the son, and Laura (Julia Brown), the stepmother), who are first introduced making the grueling walk down the hallway of a hospital. Isaac's father, whom Laura has married recently after the death of the man's first wife and the boy's mother, has been in a car accident, and upon arriving in the hospital room, Laura informs the poor kid that it's time to say good-bye to his father, who is on a ventilator and completely covered in blood-soaked bandages.

After that, things are blur for the pair. Isaac becomes lost in video game console that his dad gifted him. Laura keeps pulling bottles from the wine cellar of the sizeable, remote home that her late husband, an architect, built and passes out watching videos of three together. Isaac stops eating, and after going over her husband's will, Laura has to make a decision.

The boy has no legal guardian at the moment, having lost both of his parents and with no other blood family members still alive. She could take over guardianship until Isaac is 18, or the boy will end up in the system. The shock and the fact that Isaac seems to have no emotional connection to her make this quite the dilemma.

These early scenes are so grounded in a sense of reality and tangible, human stakes that it's a genuine surprise when someone—or something—unexpected shows up inside the house one night. Barfoot has not hinted at, teased us with, or otherwise suggested that such a thing could happen—not in the silent prologue, which has an older Isaac (James Harper-Jones) staring at a vent inside the house some years later, or at any point during the introduction of the scenario.

Yes, both Isaac and Laura imagine or dream of strobing lights and a silhouetted figure standing outside the house, but considering how much their life has become staring at screens and being in denial about the family's tragedy, what's to say these visions are nothing more than their grief-stricken minds playing tricks on them? Barfoot has planted his story in nothing else except the harsh despair of these two characters until the point of the arrival of the mysterious person—or thing.

That makes it much easier to accept this figure, a dark and curled-up ball of mass and limbs crouched under the dining table, when it does appear. That the entity is genuinely unnerving as a broad concept with a very specific appeal to Isaac makes it even more of a particular kind of threat, as well as an expansion of the film's depiction of grief.

All we come to know of the thing, with that lack of knowledge extending through to the end of the film, is that keeps appearing to Isaac. In a low growl of a voice, the creature knows the boy's name, of his pain, and the only thing he wants right now. That gurgled whisper alters as it speaks to Isaac, telling him that's he's special and that he should follow the entity's instructions. The voice begins to sound a bit familiar, because we've seen those videos of the family happy together, and Isaac quickly becomes convinced that it's his father, somehow returned from the dead or revealing that he didn't actually die in such a sudden, unexpected way.

The title more or less gives away Barfoot's most unsettling piece of imagery here, but the filmmaker withholds the sight of that image for so long and only implements it in full so infrequently that it's repeatedly upsetting and startling whenever the vision does appear. Jump-scares often get a bad rap—and often for good reason, too, because they're so regularly a cheap gimmick for filmmakers who think horror is little more than shocking an audience. Barfoot, however, clearly understands, not only how to establish an atmosphere of dread (The entire first act does that on an emotional level that slowly evolves into an otherworldly one), but also why it's so vital to the process of legitimately scaring us.

When the creature's face first appears, it is genuinely terrifying, because of the build-up, the specific timing within the scene, and the visage's big smile should be comforting but is transformed into something sinister in the context of the moment. It often appears at a distance, down the air duct in Isaac's bedroom or past the entryway of a large cabin that the father apparently built for his son before he died, but it's unmistakable and chilling, regardless. It's even more so because Isaac doesn't see it that way and keeps seeking the face for reasons that, again, the title should make clear.

Whatever this thing is—a real monster or one invented by Isaac's mourning—is almost irrelevant, because the entity itself possesses such a potently sad and tragic meaning at its core. It's the desire of a boy to see his father again at any cost to himself and others, and Daddy's Head makes that feeling, as well as Laura's own mounting realization of her relationship with the kid, palpable as a source of both painful reality and escalating horror.

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