Film Review - Baghead
Images courtesy of StudioCanal.
Based on his 2017 short film of the same name, Alberto Corredor’s Baghead is a horror film about a young woman who inherits her father's pub, only to find out there's a supernatural entity in the basement with the ability to take on the form of dead loved ones. There's a small catch, though, as there often is with these kinds of films: you can only speak to the deceased for two minutes at a time, after which the titular entity takes over and gets more powerful. She's also not allowed to leave the basement and is weaker in the broken crevice of the wall, among various other rules that the film makes up on the fly.
Right from the get go, there's very little attempt to create tension or otherwise immerse the viewer in the atmosphere. Simply setting your film in England isn't enough to make it horrific, we need more than bumps in the night and British accents. The creature design just isn't all that scary, and the abundance of cheap CGI and cutaways from anything that might evoke moderate gore do little to elevate it or back it up with sufficient malice. It's no wonder why none of the characters seem particularly stressed about adhering to the two minute rule, as the Baghead is frequently given free reign to torture the cardboard cutout characters.
Freya Allan does what she can in the lead role of Iris, but the script has absolutely nothing in the way of seasoning - the filmic equivalent of a plain boiled potato. Jeremy Irvine's Neil is somewhat charming in fleeting moments, but again, the dialogue lets him down and what few “twists” the plot attempts to offer feel less earned and more the product of inconsistent character writing. Sidekick Katie (Ruby Baker) gets the worst end of it though, whose addition is wholly unnecessary to the story outside from adding moments of forced conflict between herself and Iris, and being exposited at, in a scene that reveals perhaps the blandest monster backstory I've seen in a wide cinematic release in over a decade.
This moment in particular is the closest the film gets to even unintentional comedy, as Katie has the entire lore of the entity revealed to her by an apparition of the Baghead itself (one of its first victims, after being burned at the stake for witchcraft), only for said apparition to conclude the exchange with “Oh, you're not the owner of this establishment? My bad, you weren't meant to hear that.” It's an abrupt and inconclusive segment, as the reveal of a supposed brotherhood that has exploited the supernatural being for centuries doesn't even lead into a revelation that Neil is a descendant of this cult that I was half expecting. It would've been predictable, but at least it would've been something. Throughout the entire runtime, I couldn't help but feel the film as a whole would've been far more tense if it just revolved around Iris and Neil trapped in the pub with the Baghead, but again, that would require the film having ideas beyond just padding out its short film concept to feature length.
Last but not least, let's talk about the elephant (or should I say kangaroo) in the room - last year's Talk to Me. As much as I had my own issues with Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut feature, the sheer boredom of Baghead gave me plenty of time to think about how much I truly appreciated that film. Literally everything in this film is a downgrade, from the pacing, to the effects work, to the entity’s design and lore, all the way to the themes, or lack thereof. There is a half-assed attempt to frame the creature as an arbiter of female rage, but it feels more the product of following various current tropes than any sort of conscious effort on the filmmaker's part. Likewise, none of the performances come even close to the emotional punch of Sophie Wilde, nor the charisma of the rest of the cast. Even the concept is similar enough that from the trailer alone, it looked like Mum had said we already have Talk to Me at home.
With all that being said, the worst thing about Baghead can't quite be narrowed down to any one particular feature, but rather its whole approach. It's complicit not only with mediocrity, but with being just shy of average in almost every conceivable way a horror movie can be. It's not scary, it's not admirable in its weirdness, it's not even bad enough to be entertaining as a cult film. It's precisely the worst thing a film can be - boring (my snarky one-line Letterboxd review was literally just Bored to Me). The film's title and entity design may draw from the infamous slasher trope of the bag-headed killer (see The Town that Dreaded Sundown, Nightbreed or the first two and a quarter Friday the 13th films), but it ends up advocating for possibly the ideal viewing experience - with a burlap sack placed over one's head for the entirety of the runtime.
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Baghead is screening in cinemas from Thursday, February 22nd. For tickets and more info, click here.