Daddy’s Head review – a creature emerges from grief in clever British psychological horror

A monster, or the supernatural, as a manifestation of uncontainable emotions is hardly a new idea, especially as so-called elevated horror has leaned into the concept – perhaps because of the classier, grounded psychological element it lends genre fare. New Brit chiller Daddy’s Head adopts this increasingly familiar tactic, and just about succeeds in freshening it up with a superlative creature and great production design.

Preteen Isaac (Rupert Turnbull) has had the misfortune to lose not one, but both parents, when his architect father James (Charles Aitken) is killed in a car accident shortly after his mother’s death. This leaves Isaac marooned with stepmother Laura (Julia Brown) in an isolated showpiece home in the forest where, in their separate corners, both struggle with their grief. She swallows her misgivings, and lots of red wine, in order to attempt to foster the boy – and if the wild monster murals he has drawn in his bedroom don’t indicate what the kid’s preferred coping strategy is, the freakish intrusion of a hunched black entity in their living room seems like a definitive answer.

It becomes increasingly clear that the creature is fundamentally bound to Isaac; an expression of his abandonment-rage and of his loathing for Laura. Director Benjamin Barfoot is more expediently vague than carefully ambiguous about whether the incursions could be anything more – something truly external or supernatural – and defaults to meting out Isaac’s unravelling in beats that are very much on the nose psychologically. After he spies on Laura drunkenly kissing “helpful” family friend Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White), lo and behold he’s drawn back towards the forest.

Barfoot taps into liminal terrors more effectively through the visuals, from the gracefully shot fugue states experienced by stepmother and surrogate son, to a sinewy barrelling nightmare-beast that has apparently escaped from a Chris Cunningham video. These sequences drum up enough raw ambience to let this otherwise-middling fable finally sink in a few teeth.

• Daddy’s Head is on Shudder from 11 October.