Baghead (M, 94 minutes)
2 stars
There's a review of Baghead on Letterboxd titled 'Talk to Meh' and it's hard to come up with a better way to summarise this film.
As you might have guessed, this new horror shares some plot similarity with the juggernaut Aussie horror Talk to Me from last year, but none of its spark, depth or memorability.
The new film follows a young woman, Iris (Freya Allan, best known for her role as Princess Ciri in The Witcher) who inherits a weird, closed pub in Berlin called The Queen's Head from her deadbeat and now actually dead father.
Having recently been evicted, this news couldn't have come at a better time, and she decides to hold on to the pub rather than selling it to developers, as the estate executor suggests.
But it doesn't take long to realise that this place is hiding a dirty little secret.
Of course, none of this is news to the audiences, who were treated to a prologue sequence with Iris's father Owen (Scottish actor Peter Mullan, whose talents are mostly wasted in this) leaving a video message for the incoming owner, and then crawling along the floor on fire until his eventual death.
Iris is startled by the arrival of a man (played by Jeremy Irvine, War Horse, in a bit of a different role for the actor) at the pub who says he wants to see his wife, and he can do that if he just heads downstairs. We saw this man desperately trying to achieve the same thing with Owen earlier.
As it happens, living in the basement of The Queen's Head is some sort of supernatural entity that can, for just a little while, take the form of someone who has died.
Unlike in Talk to Me, where a willing participant agrees to let a dead person inhabit their body for a little while, this creature wears a bag on its head and consumes an item belonging to the person they're about to conjure. Then, when they remove the bag, they have become the requested decedent.
These sequences are the highlight of the film.
The creature is dead-set creepy, with jerky movements galore, and the bag over the head situation is very unsettling. At one point there's some crawling on the ceiling action, which is always disconcerting.
But the rest of the writing is pretty lacklustre. It's quite unclear that the pub is in Germany until well into the movie, when Iris's friend Katie (Ruby Barker from Bridgerton) starts looking up someone attached to the pub and finds articles from the local Berlin newspapers. All the characters are British, even Neil (Irvine's character who lives not too far from the pub), so it doesn't make a lot of sense for the pub to be in Germany.
Iris is also written without a single ounce of self-preservation, which again makes very little sense for a girl who was raised in care. Then there's the big "reveal" moment towards the end of the film, which director Alberto Corredor wants you to think is shocking and profound - it's played out like the big twist/reveal moment in any of the Saw films - but is nothing more than a rehash of what we've already seen.
Once you see all this, it comes as no surprise to learn that Baghead is a feature-length adaptation of a 2017 short film from the same director. When you don't have to pad out the story with motivations and backstories for characters and have them be a realistic human for 90-odd minutes, it's probably a lot easier to skate by on the relatively intriguing concept of a creature which brings back the dead for a couple of minutes.
But, alas, this is a full movie and it's not up to scratch. Writer Bryce McGuire - who penned the script with first-timer Christina Pamies based on the original short film written by Lorcan Reilly - was also responsible for this year's underwhelming horror, Night Swim.
