In the Flesh: Daddy's Head

I don’t think anything in Daddy’s Head is poorly done. The performances range from decent (Nathaniel Martello-White as Robert) to unsettlingly raw (the young Rupert Turnbull as Isaac). Director Benjamin Barfoot knows what he’s doing behind the camera, with his disorienting score, and with his spare but deeply unsettling and occasionally moving screenplay. None of it is boring or particularly implausible. It’s a perfectly good horror movie. Better than average, even. Even its shopworn central relationship, Laura’s (Julia Brown) conflicted attempts to form a bond with Isaac, her stepson, in the wake of his father James’s (Charles Aitken) accidental death, is well-executed and just wrinkled enough to keep it from feeling stale. The film’s only real problem is that it doesn’t quite mesh into anything as good as its individual elements. Its clear reverence for Under the Skin is at odds with its conventional storytelling. The magnificent uncanny strangeness of its monster does not play well against its straightforward characters.

These are, ultimately, more or less quibbles. It’ll be interesting to see whether Barfoot grows as a director or shrinks into the shadow of his influences, but in the meantime, Daddy’s Head has plenty to recommend it. Take the aforementioned monster, played in its semi-human form by Aitken. It’s a nightmare, from its introductory scene in which it teaches itself to mimic human language while lurking in the shadows of Isaac’s bedroom to the not-quite-dog it transforms into to lure Laura’s German Shepherd, Bella, to her death. Even close-up the creature feels like an ambulatory panic attack, scaly and ribbed and not quite right, its scurrying locomotion artfully half-hidden to prevent it from looking too silly. In concealment, though, it really shines. I won’t soon forget the image of James’s grinning face half-hidden in the gloom at the end of an air vent, groaning words that might be a real attempt to communicate or just the word salad of an angler fish-like entity trying to get its prey to come a little closer.

The strange fractal structure in the woods, the excellent Foley and sound design, the genuinely affecting moments between Laura and Isaac as they form a new family unit in the devastating wake of James’s death — even when Daddy’s Head isn’t quite living up to its potential, it’s largely because it set its visual and thematic sights so high. Isaac’s hysterical need to believe that his father has come back to life could feel trite or silly in even slightly less accomplished hands, but Turnbull brings his anger and confusion to life with both force and deft detail. Barfoot may have aimed too high, but his debut shows both love for and understanding of some of horror’s greatest creative touchstones, from Alien to Under the Skin, and enough vision of his own for me to feel excited at the prospect of a second feature.