‘Daddy’s Head’: Review

Dir/scr: Benjamin Barfoot. UK. 2024. 97mins

For his second feature, British writer/director Benjamin Barfoot (Double Date) has concocted a story about a young boy visited by a creature who wears the mask of his recently deceased father. Inevitably, this will mean it draws comparisons to The Babadook, the current high-bar for grief manifestation horror, but Daddy’s Head, which premiered at Fantastic Fest, is sharply drawn, well-shot, and genuinely unsettling in its own right.

The creature is the film’s strongest asset

Set for a release on Shudder from October 11, Daddy’s Head marks a departure from Barfoot’s debut, 2017’s fast-moving raucous horror-comedy Double Date. Much of Barfoot’s screenplay here (inspired, says the filmmaker, by his own parents’ divorce when he was a child) is about restraint and the insidious toxicity of suppressed emotions. The central creature, played by Matthew Allen and augmented by visual effects, is clearly influenced by the work of British video artist Chris Cunningham and, in its movements, recalls the spider-like puppet of Matthew Holness’s Possum. It is the film’s strongest asset.

The main thrust of the story is set shortly after pre-teen Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) and his stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) have buried his father, James (Charles Aitken), who was killed in a car accident. Isaac’s mother is also dead, and he is not particularly close to Laura — who, by her own admission, never wanted to be a parent. Alone in his grief, and despite the best efforts of family friend Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White), Isaac loses himself in video games or creating the creepy pencil drawings that adorn his walls, just as Laura loses herself to oblivion in her nightly bottle-or-more of wine

Laura and Isaac are marooned, both in their grief and in this isolated glass house which has become cold and empty. When a frightened Isaac shares a bed with Laura it looks to be a thaw, only for the awkwardness to return with the cold light of day. And when Isaac starts talking about seeing his father — or, at least, something that looks like him — in the extensive woods beyond their garden, it pushes them even further apart.

There is something in the trees, of course, and the creature which is soon lurking under the table, crouching in the corner of Isaac’s room and folding itself into the heating vents is spine-tinglingly effective. An all-black, long-limbed mix of insect and human, it wears a disturbing approximation of James’s face and, speaking in in a low, disembodied growl, professes its distrust of Laura, its love for Isaac and its desire to care for him in the woods.

It may be difficult to see how Isaac could ever believe this terrifying, skittering thing to be his father. Yet young actor Turnbull digs deep into his character’s overwhelming sense of loss and denial, so desperate for the return of his dad that it is easy to see why he would willingly accept this creature’s affection, however grotesque. 

Serving as his own editor (and composer), Barfoot works in tandem with cinematographer Miles Ridgway to deliver a mix of slow-burn tension — the camera prowls the echoing, now-soulless house, pans across the misty garden to the dark forest beyond, catches a glimpse of movement in a shadow — and deliciously sharp jump scares. A discovery of the creature’s extravagant woodland lair adds a chilling Hansel and Gretel, folk horror element to proceedings.

Sound design is also key, the scuttling and scratching and whispering often fading into the background so you’re never quite sure what you’ve heard. It all ties into Barfoot’s intentional ambiguity about the exact nature of his creature but, whether real or imagined, it leaves a lasting impression.