Director: Ant Timpson
Writer: Toby Harvard
Cast: Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Garfield Wilson
Genre: Horror, Comedy
Country: Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, United States
Before anything else, I would like to bless Elijah Wood for his hand in giving us this recent trend of off-kilter horrors; namely, Mandy and Color Out of Space of late. Each are extremely odd, extremely bemusing pictures, very much for a specific audience, but goddamn do they do that niche well. Come to Daddy is no different. Whether that’s something that entices or puts you off is one of the more subjective questions here, and I can’t really blame you for either decision.
Come to Daddy shares a bit with the two movies above, though it’s far more in Mandy‘s camp: both movies tell a story about somebody unwittingly forced into conflict to rectify some sort of loss, both feature strange and darkly witty villains, and both have various sequences that satisfyingly use the colour red. Come to Daddy doesn’t match the intensity of Mandy‘s immediate otherworldly pull and is milder in almost every conceivable way, but the family resemblance is clear.
In this instance, we have Norval (Elijah Wood, boasting one of the most egregious haircuts put to film over the past year), an obvious loser whose desperation to be someone pushes him to look like a gentle Joe Exotic, trekking off the beaten path to reunite with his father, Gordon (Stephen McHattie), after receiving a letter asking him to visit. And since this is a horror picture, you can assume this won’t be a joyful rendezvous. Gordon is a creepy asshole and the movie wastes no time establishing this as we endure uncomfortable gazes and incredibly awkward conversations between him and Norval, which, dare I say, gets a little tedious as the movie waits to play its hand.
Thankfully, Come to Daddy is clever enough to anticipate where we think this is all going and bluntly shuts it down. It’s a trick used twice to excellent effect, shifting gears for the entire movie, and all the little fake-outs throughout (like a fantastically prolonged sequence with Norval gloating about being a big deal in music, only falling apart thanks to Elton John, revealing both he and Gordon are insufferable in their own ways) force you to just sit down and absorb how things pan out. The progression from terse words to Elijah Wood wildly stabbing a guy in the dick is very quick indeed, so dwelling on and trying to work things out doesn’t do favours for anyone.
This isn’t to say that Come to Daddy is a revelation in story structure, but it’s fun, knows its twists, and executes them well with little regard to the peripherals – a fancy way of saying the characters need to function more so on their personalities. How fortunate, then, that the people who inhabit Come to Daddy all vary on a spectrum of bizarre, with the only one approaching a remote semblance of ‘normal’ being local coroner Gladys (Madeleine Sami), who still opens with a joke about a fresh corpse. Even though the movie doesn’t care to do much with many of these characters, everyone involved makes an honest effort to stand out, succeeding where it matters.
Wood does well to embody the shift from hapless wannabe to an angrier, still mostly hapless person who’s had everything but has made nothing, and has yet to resolve the emotions that followed his father abandoning him and his mother, who remains offscreen, when he was 5 despite it being 30 years since. This loss isn’t nearly as tangible or raw as that of Nicolas Cage’s wife in Mandy, but it still fuels Norval’s every action, driving him to alcohol dependency, later driving him to kill so he can a) survive, and b) keep the option for a relationship with his father steady, emphasized in the end when they’re bloodied on the beach outside his father’s home (which itself is lovely. We’re never given a good orient for its layout, so it’s a confusing and lonely place), eventually holding hands, giving both Norval and his father a quiet sense of peace.
The other notable performance belongs to Michael Smiley, playing the villain Jethro, who’s very much like a murderous, Irish Weird Al. While I wouldn’t exactly call Come to Daddy hilarious – even though many seem to attribute it as a comedy first, which might be misleading since it’s really more of a comedy of circumstances (a scene where Norval is trying not to wake up a motel room full of swingers comes to mind) than a comedy of “ha ha” jokes – Smiley receives the bulk of the lines that come close to that and he’s wonderful with them. There’s a terrific shot of him hobbling along a road in the movie’s little town, mostly dark save for a blinking red light, with Norval following behind, neither bearing a sense of urgency nor much energy at all (leading to the funniest scene in the movie). At that moment both men are one and the same, merely tired shadows playing a tired game. There isn’t much in the way of striking imagery in Come to Daddy aside from that, with its visual style most aptly summed up with “dark”, but the occasional flashes of colour, like a cellar bathed in exquisite red, are delightful. These flashes are more prevalent as the intensity begins to boil, and I’m inclined to believe that Come to Daddy would improve much if it trimmed the time to get to Twist A, then the time in between Twist A and Twist B, since everything after that last interim is fantastic. Everything in-between is generally more content to beat around the bush, a direction that works well in retrospect after the movie’s revealed its cards, but in the moment starts to become a drag that one doesn’t anticipate from a 95-minute picture.
Come to Daddy isn’t ever scary, though it does play around with Gordon’s creepiness for the first 20 minutes, maybe. This isn’t a critique, it doesn’t go out of its way to scare you. But for those who aren’t aware of what they’re getting into (and this is a low-key enough movie where I don’t imagine that’s a huge problem) there’s a decent-to-good chance they’ll be underwhelmed, or unsatisfied. It’s a very particular kind of movie, one that sees horror as a reason to tell fun and eccentric stories, and it’s a welcome change from the usual haunts and jaunts we get these days. I’m well within Come to Daddy‘s target audience, though, so your mileage may vary. It’s maybe a milder option among its niche (save for a couple moments of spectacular brutality), but Come to Daddy functions perfectly well as a routinely involving strange adventure, and is one of the better choices if you’re on the lookout for such a thing.
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