When Iris Lark (Freya Allan) hears from a solicitor (Ned Dennehy), she is at her wits end. Broke, living on friend Katie’s (Ruby Barker) couch, no job prospects and only a sliver of a dream for school, she’s got nothing to look forward to. But then she learns her dad Owen (Peter Mullan) has died and she should come to Berlin for the reading of his will. Thanks to Katie’s generosity, she gets a flight. There, the solicitor is happy show her dad’s property—a run-down pub—while providing every motivation to divest herself of the place.
She doesn’t see a building in need of serious upkeep, however. Iris sees the pub for what it is, an opportunity to have her own place and make something of herself, given over by the man who abandoned her in her time of need. So, instead of waiting for Katie to come and give her some decent advice, she puts her name on the pub’s deed after only one night’s thought.
When a stranger appears inside the place, offering to pay to see “the woman in the basement,” Iris is confused, believes him to be nuts, but is happy to take his money. Neil (Jeremy Irvine) returns the next night with the promised funds, so Iris leads the way downstairs and discovers his crazy request is not so crazy after all. There is a woman locked away in the cellar. Or is she human at all?
A hunched creature (Anne Müller) in rags, wearing a bag on her head, lives on the other side of a hole in the brick wall down there. She emerges when called and is under the control of the pub’s owner—that person has also unwittingly signed up to become the creature’s guardian. Surprise! The woman can consume a personal effect and can channel the spirits of the dead ones who owned those objects. Neil is looking to speak with his wife Sarah (Svenja Jung) but winds up with his mother Regina (Julika Jenkins). After a couple of minutes of confusion and kindness, the old ghost inexplicably turns mean.
Soon enough, Neil is bitten by the bug of curiosity. Iris seems to be all the more adamant about remaining in the place. Only Katie has the sense to want to get out … but this is compromised by her loyalty to her friend. It seems they are all drawn to the place like moths to flame. And we all know how that turns out for the moths …
Can the new guardian and her bestie find information from a videotape of instructions Owen left before he died? Do the personal effects of a previous owner, Otto Vogler (Felix Römer) hold a clue about the creature’s origins and how to escape a mystical hold she has on the owner of the place? Or is Iris doomed to follow in her father’s footsteps, losing her mind, her will to live, and ultimately her life? Alberto Corredor helms a creature feature with touches of gothic and folk horror in the eerie yarn, Baghead (2023).
Some pictures, particularly those with lofty ambitions to chill the blood with supernatural horrors and the fantastique, know how to both setup and pay off their frights with appropriately dramatic and invigorating terms. Others can do one but not the other.
Baghead has a terrific opening half. There is heart and strangeness, a sense of the uncanny and wonderfully eerie moments. Sure, the picture is drawing from a similar place of inspiration as the recent Talk to Me (2023), but these two flicks approach the subject of communicating with the dead in rather different ways. The way Corredor invites us into the story, with a brief prologue featuring Owen’s attempts to burn the pub down thwarted by an encounter we do not witness and Iris’ introduction to it, Kattie’s arrival, Neil’s offer, and the ultimate reveal of what is happening downstairs is all well shot, nicely paced, building up mystery while giving us information aplenty. As the mystic elements take hold on some of the characters, we can see the addiction metaphor and sense the way the film is grappling with stewardship or parenting. There are two credited screenwriters here, Christina Pamies and Bryce McGuire, but since there’s no ampersand between them, the writers have provided individual drafts, the latter of which fed off the former and did not change more than half of the material. Still, the flow of information suggests some effective build up.
Unfortunately, there is a point about two-thirds of the way in the picture where it seems like no one really knows how to end the thing. The story loses its way. Instead of a big reveal or unexpected twist, the story presents a flow of inevitable, predictable events.
The problem here is one of screenwriting 101. Only one of the characters in the play has any real concrete motivation. Iris wants to stop feeling like a failure, but she has no real ideas for how to do that. Neil wants to talk to his dead wife … but he doesn’t do much once he gets the chance. Baghead herself wants to get out of the basement, but we never really get a sense of why. Katie is the one character who has a motivation: she wants to get her friend out of the mess she’s in, safe, sane, and with all her parts intact.
Now, the audience not really being explicitly told what the characters wants or needs is not necessarily a bad thing. Disney movies have two songs that tell us exactly that, and it’s as ham-handed a way of communicating as any ever devised for motion pictures. It works, of course, but it’s not terribly sophisticated. Still, these elements should come through in the dialogue, in the actions, or some other way. Here, we don’t get a sense of what the main players want or need, what they are afraid of, what they are willing to sacrifice for … so the picture winds up feeling like a cool setup of ideas that has no understanding that it is characters we can relate to that carries an audience’s interest and lets us indulge fear. The way we build that empathy is by giving characters two qualities: a specific brass ring to strive for (what they are aiming for) and a flaw (what is internally working against them achieving their brass ring). Watching the picture, I don’t get a sense that anyone involved here knows both aspects of Iris, Baghead, or Neil. There are generalities where there should be specifics. So, the terrific setup winds up with a sputtering payoff and the story fizzles instead of burning brightly.
Still, Freya Allan, Ruby Barker, Anne Müller, Jeremy Irvine bring good performances, adding life and verve to the material they’ve been given. We want there to be some big reveal or cool moments in the finale because of the way they perform in the opening half.
The cinematography from Cale Finot takes full advantage of the wonderful textures inside the bar as well as underneath it. The exterior shots are lovely as well. The color pallet tends toward the drabber side, with grays and slate predominant. However, the greens of plants and nature’s intrusion into mankind’s world pop nicely.
The film includes a mix of swell practical makeup and some less swell CGI. There are some fire effects that don’t look either particularly cool or convincing, but that’s neither here nor there. The creature designs are enjoyably creepy, and the way Müller moves as the titular beastie both unsettles and invites pathos. This was a human being at one point, and the abuses it has suffered to turn it into this shambling shape are never specified but obvious in the body language and sese of presence.
While Baghead does not build to a terribly effective conclusion, it’s worth checking out for the mood and atmosphere in the opening. When Katie finishes learning the sinister truth behind Baghead’s presence in the cellar, things tend to go downhill pretty fast. Up until that point, it’s a well done exercise in mood and atmosphere, which explores human frailty and the yearning to know more.
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Baghead is currently playing on Shudder and VOD. It is not yet available in DVD or Blu-ray editions.
Writing for “She Waits Below: Baghead (2023)” is copyright © 2024 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
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