Grief and the adjustment to life without a loved one is a horror in and of itself. In Benjamin Barfoot’s Daddy’s Head, takes the idea of adjustment and remembering a lost loved one and violent warps it even further into the realm of the surreal and nightmarish, creating something uniquely terrifying in the end.
Laura is having a rough go of things. Recently widowed, she is charged with the welfare of her young stepson, who is arguably having an even worse time. Trying to make the best of things and give her stepson a proper upbringing, Laura and Isaac (the stepson) are soon confronted with an increasingly eerie series of events that lead them to realize maybe their late husband/father is as departed as they had thought.
This movie is, in short, absolutely fucking terrifying. Barfoot immerses the viewer into an escalating nightmare that pauses only long enough to let the viewer catch their breath before pushing them along to the next petrifying sequence of events. The pacing is perfect, clipping along at an almost unwanted pace towards whatever horrors await us. Wisely and deftly using a less is more approach, for much of the film we see only hints of…whatever it is that is haunting Laura and Isaac, with the brief glimpses of it making its appearance all the ghastlier. Leaning into the concept of the uncanny valley, Isaac’s depiction of the thing pretending to be his late father are the stuff of nightmares, and his interactions with it are even more frightening, and the idea of the real horror of it clearly being something not quite perfectly imitating his late father is chilling in execution. There’s a touch of Junji Ito-style horror in this film, in that there’s no explanation for what’s going on, no real reason for it, no google expert who arrives and expositions the horror away as a curse or an ancient indigenous demon or whatever. It’s just some weird and awful thing that arrives in the lives of two people already suffering from tragedy and makes their lives exponentially worse. The cruel randomness of it makes it even more frightening.
Grief as a source of horror is something of a horse on the verge of being beaten to death in the realm of horror in the mid 2020’s, but Barfoot does something refreshing with the idea with Daddy’s Head. Instead of just a straight shot of grief and mourning, Barfoot injects the very real dilemma of also being single parent to a child who resents you for not being their biological parent to the mix. Julia Brown’s Laura is not just dealing with losing her husband, she’s also dealing with a child she loves very much despising her while she herself struggles with how to help him with his grief. It’s a very layered depiction of grief done in a way I haven’t seen many films successfully pull off before, and it further sets this film apart from the pack. This complicated version of dealing with death adds a relatable touch to the film, anchoring it somewhat in reality and giving the audience a frame of reference and empathy for the otherwise monstrous tale. Likewise, there’s an insidious subtext running through the film: our memories of our loved ones are not immutable. Over time, they can subtly shift, and eventually we might not be remembering them for how they were. Sure, they’re likely not the monstrous versions of themselves like they are in this film, but there’s a tragic implication throughout this film that even the most cherished memories can be lost to time.
There’s a lot of horror films that try and make grief the real horror of the story. Daddy’s Head absolutely presents grief and the inability to deal with loss as something worthy of being called horrific and gives us something genuinely frightening imagery in the process. It’s a successful balancing act of high minded metaphor and the monstrous, successfully blending the two ideas into an unfortunately easily digestible film that will leave you legitimately terrified.
