Benjamin Barfoot’s sophomore feature turns grief into a creature that will reach into the back of your skull, forcing you to relive childhood nightmares you thought you had forgotten.
Audiences at this year’s Fantastic Fest were in for a marathon of imperfect parenthood and the monsters born out of our early traumas. Films like Spider One’s Little Bites and Barfoot’s Daddy’s Head were torturous follow ups to the 10th anniversary screening of The Babadook hosted by Mike Flanagan and Jennifer Kent. The genre is always evolving, and filmmakers are growing ever so inventive in how they make their mark – but one thing in life is certain, and that is the inevitability of experiencing grief. The only question is when it will finally touch you.
Unfortunately, for Isaac (the talented little Rupert Turnbull), death is all too familiar. After his father dies tragically from a car accident, Isaac is left with his reluctant step-mother Laura (Julia Brown), a woman who is unwilling to be a mother despite having married a man with a child. Having already lost his mother years prior, Isaac has no family left. Unless she wishes to tear him away from his only home, a gorgeous house outside the city designed by his father, and place him in the hands of the foster care system, Laura is forced to be the caretaker of a grieving and distant child while she struggles herself to cope with the loss.
Both Laura and Isaac are sucked into their own vices, growing further away from each other and even more resentful of their forced relationship. Funeral arrangements, including daddy’s request to be buried next to mommy in the garden, unearth the roots of Laura’s insecurities. Her struggles with substance abuse resurface as she quickly turns to the bottle, drinking herself into a nightly stupor while playing an endless loop of home videos. Children are astoundingly perceptive, always watching, listening, and internalizing their environment. Isaac hears her cries, sees her passed out on the living room floor, and feels the way he is not wanted in his own home.
In this home devoid of happiness, something sinister crawls its way into the shadows, preying on the vulnerability of this young boy looking for love. Isaac begins to hear the disembodied voice of his father, a voice that rattles with an eerie croak. He finds himself face to face with none other than his daddy’s head. However, this face is mounted onto a grotesque, spidery yet humanoid body that blends into the darkness. Reminiscent of various stories of cryptids across different cultures, it is immediately unclear who or what is trying to convince Isaac to follow it deep into the woods. Desperate to believe that his beloved father has returned to him, he thrusts himself into the fantasy being fed to him by this monster. When the house that once a safe space filled with his father’s laughter is now a pit of despair littered with wine bottles, the appeal of a woodland escape is palpable.
In the Q+A at the end of the film’s screening at Fantastic Fest, Barfoot detailed his journey towards the realization that Daddy’s Head was rooted in his own experience with the breaking down of his family unit. Feeling like he lost his father, and watching the toll it took on his mother, these childhood pains lingered and manifested themselves unknowingly in his work. Starting first as the unsettling idea of talking to the head of someone you love attached to a different body, and evolving into a homegrown exploration of grief that will hit you in the gut, Barfoot’s mastery over this terrifying tale is clear. His background in animation and stop motion, paired with his unique vision (realized with the help of concept artist Brad Greenwood), has me excited for what his career will conjure next.
While it burns slowly, there is never a dull moment in Daddy’s Head. The scares built around this uncanny creature skulking about are pure nightmare fuel. It is also rather refreshing that so much is left unanswered and the audience is left without any explanation of what has happened. The imagination is a terrifying place. Like a child’s imagination may run wild with ideas about what is going bump in the night, our imagination is left to fill in the blanks. As we grow up, the boogeymen fade and we are left with only remnants of faded and disjointed memories of the fear that once felt all consuming.
Daddy’s Head is streaming now on Shudder!
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