Daddy’s Head

After pre-teen Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) loses his father in a car accident, the newly orphaned boy and his responsibility-fearing stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) live an isolated life in the countryside until Isaac's father returns in grotesquely unimaginable ways.

A grim exploration of grief with a terrifyingly ambiguous monster. On paper, Daddy's Head sounds like a concept introduced previously. Coping with familial grief has been a favorite horror staple for decades, and the "A24-ization" of elevated horror has only made such post-traumatic dysfunctional family stories more mainstream. So, it's unsurprising for Daddy's Head to remind you of the atmospheric dread in Hereditary or The Babadook. But Daddy's Head still strives to carve its own distinct identity, particularly in the visuals department, with the resurrected "daddy" being a hideous human-sized Gollum. Writer-director Benjamin Barfoot intentionally balances the ambiguity behind the monster, not dwelling too much on forced exposition or very obvious psychological discourse. This nightcrawling monstrosity may be the manifestation of Isaac's abandonment issues, but Barfoot comforts us with the silences rather than the shrieks.

Rupert Turnbull is perfectly cast as a boy coping with trauma — Rupert Turnbull's effective lead performance as Isaac carries Daddy's Head above its familiar genre trappings. Scribbling disturbing portraits of his transformed father and searching for his final traces in a forest, the promising child star plays Isaac with a muted sense of loss and longing. And thanks to Barfoot's subtle direction, Isaac isn't reduced to the usual "horror movie kid" (such as one with a vampire-like pallor and unblinking eyes that stare into nothingness). All the supernatural scares aside, Daddy's Head is ultimately a real-world tragedy capturing the loss of Isaac's innocence. This Shudder original might not break any new ground in the almost saturated market of psychological horrors, but Turnbull's performance adds some bite to the relatively straightforward narrative.