Daddy’s Head
Such feelings might be similar to those expressed in fragments of folk horror, “The Babadook,” or ”Under the Skin,” which can be associated with Benjamin Barfoot’s study of bereavement after sudden loss. It is still a fact, which was long ago intuitively understood in horror, that when we lose someone unexpectedly like, due to a car accident our entire world simply shatters. Recently, there has emerged subgenre that could be dubbed ‘Grief Horror.’ This being said, Barfoot does quite the opposite when defining his work and prioritizes the imagery over the explanation which leads to a film many may find puzzling but still remain disturbed.
Rupert Turnbull nails it in his performance as Isaac, a young boy who has just lost both parents, as Father James (portrayed by Charles Aitken), the other male figure in his life, dies shortly after Mother’s death. Alone and orphaned, he returns to the quiet home in the countryside, this time being raised by a stepmother, Laura (played by Julia Brown), who had no intention of bringing up a child. Despite falling in love and taking on the role of the stepmother, the situation has altered unbelievably; in her eyes, Isaac is not the child she chose to raise and is hinted at placing him in a foster home. To ease the suffering, she pours alcohol down her throat and descends into the arms of a divorced man named Robert (Nathaniel Martello White).
And then, into the shadows of a landscape that has been beaten senseless comes something quite literally unfathomable. With a reading of “Daddy’s head” which is also evident by smoke around the wood and lights in the dark, what occurs for James and Laura is foreign, yet one of the things that I appreciate about the film is that it refrains from knitting all its loose threads together. Laura and Isaac return from James’s funeral only to discover something peeking from beneath the table. It storms into the furthest room and out the window to the several miles and dreary forests that envelope them.
Laura thinks it could be some animal, however, Isaac begins to witness it in bizarrely anticlimactic settings, one of the AC vents in his bedroom during the horror of the film’s most haunting scene. Everyone sees what appears to be a witch’s hut in the woods, spinning to the fable folk layers of Barfoot’s story even more. Millennia of oral history reminds us that if such a place is quite real, then good things certainly don’t live in such directions, but Isaac is still set on retaliation because whatever it purports to be, it bears Daddy’s head.
From the beginning of time, the need to reunite with a dead loved one by any means including denial has been the central focus of the horror theme. But what price tag can you put against the act of bringing someone back from the dead? Barfoot explores this notion in quite visceral and authentic ways, which is heightened by the strong efforts of Turnbull and Brown. The young Isaac makes us sympathize with his role’s restraints and fears without ever slipping into contagion and performs the mixture of horror and aspiration that his character is endowed with. He is aware that this is inappropriate. However, it is father! And Brown’s depiction allows viewers to feel a deep sense of loss associated with her new role as a parent, which becomes more warped when she begins to think that Isaac might be concealing his own murderous intentions.
Fairly clearly, there’s a great deal to unpack in “Daddy’s Head.” Still, it all works mainly due to Barfoot’s supervision of the film’s well-defined technical aspects, particularly the great production design, the cinematography and editing of the film. While I think he could do with one or two left fewer jump scares and a little more polished CGI, what works here is the film’s ‘feel’ more than specific scenes. Most intriguingly, Barfoot and his crew balance the internalization of such a cold, lonely estate as a character and its evocation it is always hard to return to it because it is not a cheerful warm place. The lift chills the air. He does it with imagery that he uses quite often including circles and straight lines that enhance the chaotic and therefore uncomfortable simplicity of the monster and its surroundings. This doesn’t feel right in this context. Even if the head is that of Daddy.
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