REVIEW: Daddy’s Head [2024]

October 10, 2024

3–4 minutes

Rating: TV-MA | Runtime: 92 minutes
Release Date: October 11th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Shudder
Director(s): Benjamin Barfoot
Writer(s): Benjamin Barfoot

Come to the forest.

You can’t blame twelve-year-old Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) for losing himself after the sudden death of his father in a car accident. He’d already lived through losing his mother a few years earlier and now he’s forced to go through it all again. Unlike back then, however, the only person he has now is a stepmother (Julia Brown’s Laura) to whom he barely speaks. And since she’s as new to being a mother as he is to being her son, warmth is in short supply opposite awkward silence. So, it makes sense Isaac would latch onto an idea that his father isn’t dead after all. That he’s the only one “special” enough to see the being that visits him at night is Dad.

Written and directed by Benjamin Barfoot, Daddy’s Head bills itself as a psychological horror about grief a la A Monster Calls or I Kill Giants. Unlike those two focusing on the child alone, though, Barfoot has an adult to consider as well. Isaac buries himself in video games so he doesn’t have to cope. Laura numbs herself with alcohol to sleep after spending the evening watching old videos of her late husband. This creature that invades their house and hides in the forest trees is thus as much a potential manifestation of his subconscious as it is hers. And that’s where things kind of fall apart.

Why? Because you can flirt with the edge of reality and fantasy when it’s just one person experiencing the phenomenon. Everything a character “sees” could therefore be explained as acts they don’t realize they’re performing themselves. To have two characters (and soon three with the addition of Nathaniel Martello-White’s family friend Robert) witness these events, however, means they must really be happening. That fact adds a wrinkle that must be accounted for through explanation—whether overt or implicit. Barfoot sadly never provides either. He merely uses the monster for his needs without considering its place in the film.

So, despite being a pretty cool little beast (think a dark, demonic humanoid skittering around with a bright mask of Isaac’s father’s face), its presence is a complete manipulation. It exists to push Isaac and Laura to the ends of their sanity with seemingly no rhyme or reason beyond a throwaway line that it is “alone” too. Okay. Alone from what? A creature from where? It can’t be made up, but it also doesn’t seem to be real—so, is it a group hallucination? Has stepmother and stepson’s grief somehow merging together? If so, give us some acknowledgement. Give it some agency of its own to make an epilogue discovery meaningful.

In the end, it’s all surface thrills—the last thing you want your psychological thriller to be. Do Isaac and Laura learn anything from the incident? We can make our assumptions considering Barfoot bookends the whole with the boy grown-up, but the script ignores the actual period of that growth. What we’re seeing is the catalyst for change without any of the change. It’s like a ninety-minute introduction to the real tough drama that skips past it for a quick, bow-tied conclusion instead. Its unexplained terror is left unexplained for a cut to black that renders everything we saw moot. Because if none of the fallout is deemed worthy of our attention, why should we bother caring about the chaos?