I’m so exhausted. January horror films get a bad rep for their unoriginality and poor presentation, but all the more frustrating is January horror films that don’t lack an original concept and are technically well made, but just poorly adapted from a horror short film that had some success. Baghead follows that trend, which Night Swim from earlier this month also followed. It seems to be the new norm now that someone makes a short horror film, and suddenly we have all the studios bidding to churn out a poorly thought out and stretched beyond comprehension version of that story. If not only that sin, we also have a contender for the dumbest name of a film for 2024, “Baghead” sounds more like a poorly conceived playground insult than a film title, yet here we are.
Iris Lark (Freya Allan) is a recent evictee of her housing, along with her friend Katie (Ruby Barker). While she walks away from her housing, she gets a conveniently timed phone call to say that her estranged father Owen (Peter Mullan) has died and left the 400 year old pub he owned in her name. She flies to unidentified but maybe German city to claim her property. With the help of the creepiest estate agent possible, she signs her name on tea stained lease papers with an ancient quill to be the building’s legal owner.
On night one of her stay, an egg timer wakes her up where she finds Neil (Jeremy Irvine) skulking around the property, asking to speak to “her” offering 2000 unidentified currency for the chance. She thinks on his offer and once she receives the keys, she invites him back to speak to “her”. In this time, Katie joins Iris to make sure she is okay and be an expendable character to later hinge an emotionally strained conclusion out of.
Neil heads down to the stone laid basement where we see a brick wall that has a hole in it, along with a wooden chair in the middle of the room. The “her” he so kindly spoke of, is Baghead, who had the ability to awaken the dead as she transforms into them for a short period of time, providing you have an item from the deceased.
That’s the story, from then on, we get dragged out interactions with Baghead and a vague plan to stop her from getting out of the basement and enact her revenge on mankind through plague and sickness and other ooky spooky buzzwords chosen at random to force an origin story of this creature. The film has zero mystique or intrigue to it, never letting you guess what's to come or how things work. Logic gets incinerated from the get go and the ride from then on is a plateau of exposition with about four vapid jumpscares.
The scares are loud noises with no basis behind them, with the only one that having the slightest potential of build up being the least effective payoff of them all. This harkens back to early 2010s horror, that was only interested in scares but at least those films packed the runtime with them, they may have been cheap but they were at least there. This film gets so focused on trying to explain itself that it often forgets to be scary, and fails when it remembers. It also fails in the explanation of itself, with the origin story of the creature being detailed about an hour into the film and other vague attempts at explaining how anything is working making no sense.
More unfortunate than anything is the production, which is actually pretty good, from the monster effects to the sets and lighting. The film is presented really well and at every single turn, is dragged down by the story. Baghead’s look is effectively scary as a standalone creature, but once put into the film, doesn’t do enough to be menacing or a continuous threat to the characters.
The camera work is also well crafted, lighting the darker scenes quite well so they have a lot of inherent atmosphere to them. Following from that, the sound production was mostly inoffensive, sometimes opting for the obvious synth stings at “tense” moments but overall delivering the classic bone crunching movement that horror movie monsters have to follow. The only offensive sound effect is one use of a crash sound that I refuse to believe wasn’t the first result on a free sound effect website.
The acting in the film is fine. Nobody is good but nobody is terrible. I wasn’t a huge fan of Ruby Barker as Katie but I think that more comes down to her utilisation over her actual performance. Freya Allan as Iris drifted in soap opera acting for a good bit of her characterisation, making Iris a character I felt nothing for throughout a lot of the story. Overall she was an okay protagonist, not bringing down the quality of the film, although I think that would be an impressive feat.
The only actor I thought was actually elevating the material, was Svenja Jung playing the small role of Sarah in parts of the film. She had a weirdly engaging energy to her that made me like her character. Just felt like I should give some sort of props.
I don’t like to not like films, I go in with hopes that I can find something of value in them, or at least something to grip onto that I can praise. In this, the technical element is just about all I can speak on positively. I don’t doubt that a lot of people involved in this film put everything they could into the creation of the film, and I don’t think the film is a reflection on every cast and crew member's abilities to perform at a higher standard. I just think the material, maybe timing or studio pressure meant that the story was never going to work and the clear forcing of it was painful. Sometimes films work because they are short, and don’t need a feature length adaptation, let them be that. We should work with the creators of these short horror films to allow them to make a feature film, but maybe not based on the concept that is entirely intended for a twenty minute presentation.
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