Grief haunts a young boy and his stepmother in Daddy's Head, the second feature from director Benjamin Barfoot (Double Date).
The film premiered at 2024's Fantastic Fest, where attendees also celebrated the 10th anniversary of Jennifer Kent's The Babadook, and it's hard not to put the films in conversation. Both deal with grief over losing a father figure and a husband, both center on a woman struggling to raise a troubled boy, and both feature a terrifying creature who might as well have jumped straight out of a child's imagination. Yet Daddy's Head forges its own path too, mixing its Babadook influences with folk horror to create an unsettling portrait of how grief can rip us to shreds.
What's Daddy's Head about?
Before Daddy's Head launches us into a nightmarish creature feature, it introduces us to a nightmare that's all too real. Young Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) must say goodbye to his father James (Charles Aitken), who's being taken off life support following a devastating car crash.
Isaac has already lost his mother, and since James had no next of kin, his legal guardian is now his stepmother Laura (Julia Brown). While Isaac and Laura aren't close, Daddy's Head sidesteps the evil stepmother trope. Instead, early glimpses of home video from back when James was still alive paint Laura as someone trying to understand Isaac, even as he processes the arrival of a new maternal figure. At one point, seeing how much he loves drawing, Laura gifts him a set of colored pencils. Isaac is less than thrilled. It's a quietly brutal moment, one in which you can empathize with both Laura and Isaac. She hopes for connection, while he is still struggling with massive life changes.
The uneasy distance between Laura and Isaac becomes fraught in the wake of James' death. Laura was certainly not ready to lose her husband, let alone be the mother to his son. Every night, she numbs herself with wine and home videos, all while weighing the option of surrendering Isaac to social services. Unsure of his own fate, Isaac plays games and yearns for his father's return.
You might think that return impossible, given the fact the film opens with flashes of his bloodied, pulverized face. Yet somehow, some aspects of James follow Isaac and Laura back to their sleek, ultra-modern house, turning their grief into a literal horror show.
Daddy's Head finds horror in the grieving process.
The spooky occurrences in Daddy's Head start slow and disparate, with flashing lights reminiscent of police cars blasting through Laura and Isaac's windows, and unexplainable fires popping up in the forest that surrounds them. Here, the film falls into a pattern: day scenes that ramp up the tension between Laura and Isaac, then creepy night scenes where a wine-drunk Laura experiences these strange happenings. Between this pattern and a series of rote jump scares, Daddy's Head falls into a bland routine for a time.
Luckily, things pick up with the arrival of the titular monster, a scurrying, smiling replica of James' head. (Or could it even be the real thing?) It lurks in air vents and calls to Isaac from the forest with a raspy voice that, yes, recalls the Babadook. Of course, Laura believes the creature to be a figment of Isaac's imagination, especially given all the grotesque monsters he's drawn around his room. Even its form — and the film's own title — suggest a silly, childish monster.
However, as proof of the creature's existence quickly grows irrefutable, how Laura and Isaac choose to deal with it will define their relationship going forward. Will they give in to the monster? Will they continue to deny its existence? Or will they band together and find common ground in this shared, traumatic experience? In this, the monster becomes a stand-in for grief, and for the emotional limits it pushes us to. Both Brown and Turnbull deliver moving work as two people with very different routes to take through mourning. Brown is all unsureness and numbness, while Turnbull brings a vulnerable rage to Isaac's pain.
Barfoot wrings scares from areas besides grief as well, especially when it comes to atmosphere. James designed the house Laura and Isaac now suffer in, effectively trapping his family in a prison of his presence. An unsettling wooden structure Isaac discovers in the woods makes for a folk horror-tinged counterpoint to the main house, and an ideal lair for the monster that lurks within. The slightest flicker of James' smile in the structure's dark depths is enough to send you cowering back in your chair. Equally chilling is the fact that Isaac appears not frightened by this sight, but instead comforted, his very perception of the world warped by loss. Yes, he may be haunted by a disembodied head, but grief and its impact are the real monsters here.
