Baghead

Based on the short film of the same name by Alberto Corredor, Baghead sees Iris (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) travel to Berlin when she inherits her estranged father’s (Peter Mullan) pub after his death. Upon arrival, she discovers that she’s inherited more than the run-down building. Behind a broken wall in the basement, there dwells a shape-shifting entity that has the power to transform into the dead. When a stranger (Jeremy Irvine) arrives at the pub with a lot of money, desperate to talk to his dead wife, Iris soon finds herself in the same nightmarish scenario as her father. Inextricably connected to the thing in the basement, Iris and her friend (Ruby Barker) must find a way to destroy it before it can escape.

Beneath its creepy premise, Baghead is a story about grief. While this isn’t anything particularly groundbreaking in the genre, recent films like Talk to Me and The Night House have shown that there’s plenty of fertile ground here for filmmakers to grow and explore these ideas. Unfortunately, Corredor’s feature debut puts too much of its focus on exposition and plot instead of diving into the core themes of loss. Consequently, this movie makes for an intriguing, but ultimately shallow affair.

The creepiest part about meeting the eponymous entity is the mystery that surrounds them. Emerging from a pitch-black hole and with no explanation for what she can do, all viewers know about them is that they’re dangerous. As more is learned about the rules for interacting with Baghead (specifically that they shouldn’t be spoken to for more two minutes), audiences establish a baseline for how the creature operates without sacrificing the mystery. However, the plot soon goes out of its way to undo this intrigue by throwing tonnes of added plot points and backstory at viewers. Not only does this ruin the creature’s initial allure, but all the exposition eats into the short runtime, resulting in a rushed final act.

Although there are a handful of genuinely unexpected scares and creepy moments (with a laptop scene guaranteed to catch viewers off guard), most of the scares are the conventional genre affair that mostly consist of characters talking too loudly when they appear onscreen.

Throw in a nonsensical final twist, and Baghead becomes an underwhelming horror with too much story and not enough substance.

Andy Murray

Baghead is released in select cinemas on 26^th January 2024.

Watch the trailer for Baghead here: