Daddy's Head is a Shudder/AMC+, U.K. shocker, written and directed by Benjamin (Double Date) Barfoot, and deals with the deep bereavement that crosses from sentimentality into abject horror.
Charles Aiken plays James, a father injured in a horrendous, auto accident, relegated to a hospital, bandaged from head to toe, before dying. His son, Rupert Turnbull's Isaac, struggles with the unsettling turn, as does his stepmom, Julia Brown's Laura. It doesn't help, however, that Isaac and Julia aren't close, becoming further distanced when a family friend, Nathaniel Martello-White's Robert, starts hanging around.
This dynamic forces Isaac, who spends his free time drawing monsters, to pull into himself and soon thereafter, he begins to see and hear things beyond the ordinary, in particular a woodland spirit that not only carries his father's whispery voice, but the man's face, which is fixed by an inexplicable grin.
Laura dismisses Isaac's claim that his father is alive. Even an intervention staged by Robert and a child psychologist (Mary Woodvine) fails to quell the boy's adamant stance. Isaac also visits a hive-like structure in the woods, presumably built by his dad, where he believes the entity resides; this, in turn, invokes a consoling mural outside Isaac's bedroom, thus reinforcing his tie to the surreal.
The movie gives one good cause to suspect that the creature is just a projection of Isaac's love for his father, embroiled by a macabre penchant. The entity does wish Isaac to join him, and not Laura, but is this due to Isaac's estrangement from her?
Daddy's Head doesn't reveal all the answers, relying on insinuation and interpretation throughout. This may not work for some viewers, but for those who prefer a shadiness to their terror tales (e.g. Phantasm connoisseurs), the mystery should prompt more subconscious scares than not.
Even if it's experimental, Daddy's Head's atmosphere is concrete which (in the very least) should please those who recall their childhood fears and the maturing means they used to suppress them. That doesn't make the movie a coming-of-age fable, but it does graze the developmental stages that characterize most of us. That means, it has more than a decent shot at hitting an identifiable chord, and on that basis, deserves one's attention.
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