Producers: Matthew James Wilkinson and Patrick Tolan   Director: Benjamin Barfoot   Screenplay: Benjamin Barfoot   Cast: Julia Brown, Rupert Turnbull, Charles Aitken, Nathaniel Martello-White, Nila Aalia, Matthew Allen and James Harper-Jones   Distributor: Shudder

Grade: B

The new feature by multi-hyphenate Benjamin Barfoot—he’s responsible for the editing and music score, as well as writing and directing it—is a moodily effective psychological horror film in which profound bereavement creates a fearsome threat, whether real or imagined.

The person being mourned is James (Charles Aitken), who’s introduced lying in a hospital bed swathed in bandages and connected to a respirator, the victim of a car crash from which he’s unlikely to recover.  His young wife Laura (Julia Brown) accepts the doctors’ advice that she unplug the machine and let him go.  His death is traumatic for her, but even more so for his son Isaac (Rupert Turnbull), who’d lost his biological mother not long before; Laura is his stepmother, and they’ve never been close. 

Now they’re left to share the large modernist house James, a renowned architect, had built in a dense forest, far from town.  They express their grief in different ways.  Laura turns to wine, slipping into a stupor as she watches home movies of James, Isaac and herself in happier days.  Isaac is obsessed with playing a handheld video game that was a gift from his father.  Their only companion is a dog called Bella. 

Since Isaac has no blood relatives, Laura is confronted with the decision of becoming his legal guardian or handing him over to the child welfare service.  Her mother suggests the latter would be the better course, but Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White), a close family friend, recommends that she give it more thought. 

He also tries to encourage Isaac to rouse himself and start living again.  But that’s not easy when the boy—and Laura, too—glimpse a threatening apparition outside the house, to which Bella reacts with snarls that become more forceful as the thing appears inside, first as a pulsating mass underneath a table and then in more human-like form.   Isaac hears a voice growling his name, saying he’s special and enticing him to come into the woods.  He begins scrawling odd drawings on the walls of his room, and hearing something scraping on the other side of the air vent there.  When he sees Robert and Laura sharing a moment together, he adds anger to the mix.  Then James’s grave is vandalized.  The culmination comes after the boy discovers a peculiar structure in the forest, a sort of tunnel made from trees with a triangular entrance.  It must have been built by James, and what it contains isn’t revealed until a coda in which an older Isaac (James Harper-Jones), whom we’d seen in a prologue staring at the air vent he’d brooded over years earlier, finally investigates the interior.  But before then young Isaac has taken Robert there.

“Daddy’s Head” isn’t without its moments of shock, its jump scares.  And it gives us brief sightings of its creature, an amalgam of practical effects involving a shrouded man (Matthew Allen) and VFX elements that envelop him in haze.  But the emphasis is on establishing an atmosphere of dread and ratcheting up tension as the apparitions grow more insistent and Isaac ever more disturbed. 

The film is basically a two-hander, and both Brown and Turnbull deliver powerful turns.  Brown’s is more emotionally charged—Laura is, after all, a very young woman, in many ways still a child herself, and devastated by the sudden loss of the older man she’d married and, presumably, depended upon.  Turnbull, by contrast, conveys the sullenness of a boy, an introvert by nature, who has already endured the death of his mother and is now stunned by a second unimaginable tragedy. 

The third major character is the mood fashioned by Barfoot with the aid of production designer Declan Price and cinematographer Miles Ridgway.  The sterile interior of the house is contrasted with the dark gloominess of the forest beyond the clearing in which it’s built, and the smooth, leisurely camera movements are violently interrupted by the sudden eruptions of panic and terror.  The effect is unnerving, keeping the viewer on tenterhooks throughout.

Whether or not you find the ambiguous ending fully satisfying (or even immediately intelligible), you’ll certainly be unsettled by the grim, carefully judged buildup to it.