Worth: $9.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Freya Allan, Jeremy Irvine, Julika Jenkins, Saffron Burrows, Svenja Jung, Ruby Barker, Peter Mullan
Intro:
…. a threadbare slog that, much like its titular creature, exists to crudely imitate things that have already (or at least should have already) stopped showing any signs of life.
The last couple of years have given birth to some pleasant surprises within horror cinema. The ‘elevated’ horror deconstruction of Smile, the genuinely unpredictable Barbarian, the homegrown hero Talk To Me, even Saw X blindsiding audiences with a rare late-period resurgence; they’ve made for a good counterpoint to the overbudgeted squibs that have been populating most other genres.
Baghead, the feature debut from director Alberto Corredor (expanding from his 2017 short film of the same name), feels like an attempt to reverse-engineer a surprise hit out of those particular films.
Comparisons to Talk To Me have already begun to dominate the conversation surrounding Baghead, and while there’s some justification for that in their mutual idiosyncratic rituals for reaching out to the dead, the derivation only starts there.
Like Smile, Baghead feels like an attempt to balance the trauma hyperfixation/fetishization of ‘elevated’ horror with the quasi-procedural pacing of pre-Babadook studio horror. Like Barbarian, the narrative deals with gendered violence and inherited traumas, not to mention a suspiciously-similar womb-allegory catacomb used during the final act. And (possibly) like Saw X, this goes some way to humanise its central terror, here being a deformed medium that can take the form of the dead after she swallows one of their possessions.
But more so than any of those specific examples, there’s just a generic sheen to the film’s themes and handling of scares (read: prolonged, almost self-parodic reliance on loud noises and bright lights) that fills the cracks in-between the outsourced parts with an overwhelming, eyeroll-inducing sense of déjà vu. If you have seen [Horror Movie], you’ve seen this already.
On its own, it certainly isn’t lacking in ideas, but it is lacking in the ability to prioritise them properly. The extent to which it clings to the extremely tired formula for mainstream horror holds it back from doing anything interesting with its vore-fixated, feminist-coded, property mortgage-adjacent spook. Hell, it can’t make the prospect of actually interacting with Baghead seem enticing even to the most broken of grieving souls, falling short of the morbid thrill of the Hand in Talk To Me.
All of which is only exacerbated by the delivery, both visually and through the on-screen cast. While Corredor and DP Cale Finot show creativity in the staging of certain scenes (the method of death for each of Baghead’s forms, leads to interesting moments), their overall attempts at creepy, creaky Gothic horror feel like a blind grab for anything to stretch the original short to feature length. To say nothing of the cast, who (with the exception of Trainspotting’s Peter Mullan) have the collective personality of a Pot Noodle, and whose characters are all boring archetypes that were already getting old in the 2000s.
Baghead is a threadbare slog that, much like its titular creature, exists to crudely imitate things that have already (or at least should have already) stopped showing any signs of life. From its glorified-trailer of an introduction to its utterly incoherent attempt at a boss bitch finale, whatever useful statements it has to make on the impact of the past on the present (or hell, even the state of the housing market) can only peek out through a tiny hole in the obscuring mass of wonky presentation, scattershot pacing, and all-too-familiar tricks of the trade.
