Baghead

dir: Alberto Corredor

2023

What a strange movie. Imagine your father dying, in a horrible seeming accident, and you find out you’ve inherited a pub from him in Berlin. Berlin! And not even a good pub.

And it’s not even an ongoing business, so you don’t even have to go to the trouble of disappointing the regulars by telling them you don’t want them coming around anymore, and that you want a better class of patrons to frequent the place, not you rusted on day drinkers and shambolic alcoholics. I don’t know if German people put bets on dog races, but it’d be that level of peeps.

And they’d be the types that would nurse a pint for over an hour, because they’re there just for the familiarity, the routine, and not the ambience or the 20 Euro cocktails or the loaded bratwurst.

Maybe you’d meet a local, or a rival pub owner, and after an hour and a half of rivalry and misunderstandings, maybe finally, someone would run somewhere just in time to stop the other from leaving forever, and they’d kiss passionately as the orchestra swells, the music builds (unfortunately it’s oompah oompah polka music with all the tuba you can handle), and the happily ever afters start as the credits roll.

This is not that film. This film is about evil things, not love. This is about grief, with no consolation. And it’s also about how young people with nothing will fall victim to any scam or scheme that will give them even a hint of money for their troubles.

So desperate are the millennials, so jobless and shut out of the property market, that even being saddled with a hideously falling apart heritage overlay place you could never fix up and never make any money from legally that happens to have a monstrous and murderous creature trapped in the basement is preferable to having to work 4 gig economy jobs in order to barely afford rent on a 1 room bedsit you have to share with seven other people.

That is the predicament that faces the person that I thought was the main character, until the ending implied strongly that she wasn’t, when she ‘inherits’ the pub from her dear old dad.

Iris (Freya Allen) doesn’t have kind words or memories of her dad who, in the opening minutes of the film, dictates a doom-laden message to his darling daughter that he hasn’t seen in 20 years through the magic of video tape.

He then promptly dies after setting himself on fire. Ouch.

He was trying to burn the pub to the ground, but failed in this like apparently he’s failed at everything else in his life.

Peter Mullan is in virtually everything that gets made these days, and has been for thirty years, I think. He can sometimes play sweet, good natured characters, but more often than not plays absolute monsters. He’s not the bad guy here; he’s just misunderstood.

Someone tricked him into putting his name on the title for the pub, and that somehow supernaturally bound him to the creature in the basement, who, I guess, since it wears a bag on its head, is the Baghead of the title.

I don’t know what a baghead is or whether it’s a common thing in British lore, like, the equivalent of one of our bunyips or drop bears down here in the antipodes. I thought it was slang for an addict in the UK, but maybe I’m not up on all my supernatural creatures. In this flick the being is somehow attached to the establishment and to the person on the title, but strangers can come along and give it a memento of someone who’s died, and this being can shapeshift into that person for two minutes.

After that, whether the being was strapped to a chair or not, it becomes somehow eviler, and then starts saying hurtful, triggering statements about anyone that’s in the room and their clothing / hairstyle.

Iris only finds this out when a jerk appears in the pub and insists that he’ll give her two thousand pounds in order to speak with his dead wife.

The hell you say. Talk to his wife? But how?

Money’s money, though, and she takes the cash with barely a qualm. Iris can’t afford to have ethics or qualms. Her best friend and external conscience Katie (Ruby Barker) can afford to have qualms, and continuously tells Iris every idea she has and every action she allows (with the horrifying and dangerous being in the basement) is a bad one.

And she’s absolutely right, and she’s definitely the audience stand-in, in that she knows the film that they’re in, and Iris doesn’t.

But Iris is, except for this pub, effectively homeless. We saw her break in to the flat she’s been locked out of by the landlord for not being able to pay rent at film’s beginning, and plus the pub at least has some booze in it. All right!

And when the young man who keeps insisting that he get to speak to his wife comes in and drops a couple of thousand pounds, well, bad ideas seem like good ones when you’re the one getting paid.

As the creature’s guardian, Iris has some control over it, some ability to command it, but she keeps being told by everyone, living or dead, that if she tries to leave or abandon her responsibilities, misery, disease, plague, uh, a feeling of mild thirst will plague her always.

The young man (Jeremy Irvine) insists on speaking to his wife, but inadvertently summons his mother, who died from suicide many decades ago. The summoned have no idea what’s happened since they died, but whatever memories they still have soon give way to the general nastiness of the Baghead, who, I’m really not sure, just wants to kill people in general or make them feel bad. Baghead screams abuse at the man and sprays liquid all over him, but it doesn’t do anything, so…

If she / it has a motivation, it’s to get out of the basement and… I don’t know. There’s a perplexing backstory that implies some secret cabal of men (of course) have been keeping her in this basement for centuries, and used her for her parlor tricks, but really, so what? It’s not clear what her natural habitat is, where she should actually be. It’s a limited skill set that she possesses, so the best I can see her doing is maybe busking on street corners or in malls, summoning people’s loved ones for a bit of spare change, so she can go back down the pub and afford a pint, maybe?

Obviously, you don’t have to tell me that the patriarchy sucks, and that she has been ill-treated for a long time, and perhaps deserves to get her revenge on humanity. No “perhaps” about it; she definitely should be out there tormenting those who deserve it.

The primary aspect of her “gift” is that people use it for their own selfish purposes, and yet it never gives them the comfort or the closure they crave. Iris has been angry at her father for decades, and in summoning him back and trying to hear the “real” story of why he was a shit father, which is, because he was stopping this terror from leaving the basement, it gets her nothing.

And the young man, convinced that his wife must have been having an affair just before she died in a car crash he was responsible for, wants not closure, but to supernaturally trap his former wife for having the temerity to try to leave him. And in the Baghead he thinks he’s found a way to keep tormenting his wife indefinitely.

Thankfully, Baghead has other ideas, and doesn’t care what people want beyond using it to exploit them and make them do the dumbest things.

The movie works best, of course, during the scenes in the basement. Everything outside of the basement feels kinda meh. The detective / Nancy Drew stuff Katie tries to do ultimately doesn’t add anything to the storytelling or change anything either, and while it’s an excuse to have other characters talk, nothing they say is that interesting.

And it doesn’t matter. What matters is how far people are prepared to go against a supernatural, perhaps immortal monster that likes death, enjoys torment, and imitates not art but life for shits and giggles.

The creature itself is pretty horrifying, with a mixture of practical effects and digital stuff, but whatever she is, it’s pretty disconcerting. Freya Allen, who isn’t maybe that well known beyond playing Ciri in The Witcher Netflix series, is pretty solid, and does 90 per cent of the acting required in the flick. The other people other than the incomparable Peter Mullan and the Baghead hardly matter.

It's solid, if not really that remarkable, and is blessedly around 90 minutes, which I appreciated as well. Thank you, peoples. Every host loves it when their guests don’t outstay their welcome.

And thank you, Shudder streaming service, for another solid entry

7 times the pain of losing someone you love is almost as strong as the pain of never letting go out of 10

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“She only gives you two minutes. After that she’s in control.” – well that just sounds awfully like Talk to Me, doesn’t it? - Baghead