Daddy’s Head
The last time Isaac saw his father before the funeral, it wasn’t his father, it was a thing wrapped in bloody bandages in a hospital bed connected to tubes and being forced to breathe by a machine, told to say goodbye by Laura, not quite a stereotypical wicked stepmother so much as a stranger who had married his widower father, in love with James but less enamoured of the idea of raising a child.
Laura inheriting James’ assets including the house in the forest and its surrounding grounds, it is spartan, silent but full of memories, far from a place of healing with nothing to distract either of them from their grief, she coping stoically as an adult but Isaac faced with the loss of both parents in quick succession with no friends or extended family around him, staring at the trees by day and the walls of his room at night, listening for the voice of his father.
Written and directed by Benjamin Barfoot who also edited and composed the soundtrack, Daddy’s Head could not be more different from his previous film, the bloody knockabout comedy of a disastrous Double Date, starring Rupert Turnbull as Isaac and Julia Brown as Laura alongside Nathaniel Martello-White as her visiting friend Robert with Charles Aitken in flashback as James and James Harper-Jones as older Isaac of the framing scenes.
Laura aware her relationship with Isaac was awkward even before the tragedy, relying on James to be the parent while she was the wife, in his absence she struggles despite her conspicuous wealth and has placed her own needs first, wallowing in home movies of happier days while she almost ignores the orphan with whom she co-habits, dismissing his claims that something other than a forest animal is in the house as attention seeking and blaming him for the subsequent disruption.
The occasional visits of social worker Mary (Enys Men’s Mary Woodvine) more sympathetic, they do not help the fraught situation, Isaac isolated and without effective support to express what he is feeling, hearing the call of the forest and sensing he belongs there more than in the geometric spaces of the house with his legally designated but distant guardian, finding there a construction of tangled branch and driftwood built by his father before the accident.
With echoes of Possum in the slowly gathering dread and the spindly dark shape which creeps and lurks in the corners of the bedroom and the shadows of the forest, possibly a manifestation of Isaac’s unexpressed grief or possibly something else, the performances and physical locations in which they exist cannot be faulted but they are insufficient to fill the spaces of Daddy’s Head, the absence and loss defined by the emptiness which permeates the film but dilutes the strengths elsewhere.
Daddy’s Head will be available on Shudder from Friday 11th October
