Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Alberto Corredor
Starring: Freya Allan, Jeremy Irvine, Ruby Barker, Peter Mullan, Saffron Burrows, Julika
Jenkins
David Koepp's 1999 horror movie Stir of Echoes suffered
from being released so soon after M Night Shyamalan's phenomenon
The Sixth Sense. Some even labelled Koepp's film a knockoff of Shyamalan's, despite
the two films having been in production at the same time and
Stir of Echoes being an adaptation of a Richard Matheson
novel from 1958. Director Alberto Corredor's
Baghead may suffer from similar comparisons to 2023's
Talk to Me, with which it shares a remarkably similar central concept. Corredor's
feature debut is actually an expansion of his 2017 short of the same
name, which makes you wonder if Corredor was an influence on
Talk to Me's creators.
Both films feature a device that allows for brief communication with
the dead, with a time limit that must never be run over, lest terrible
things be unleashed. In Talk to Me it's a ceramic hand,
while here it's a centuries old witch who dwells in the basement of a
Berlin pub. If you want to contact a dead person you visit the boozer
and give the witch, who wears a potato sack over her head, a personal
belonging of the deceased. "Baghead" then swallows said trinket before
removing her sack and appearing in the form of the dead person. You can
only speak with the dead for two minutes before Baghead starts to grow
powerful until the sack is placed back over her head and she's banished
back into her cavernous home behind a wall. Hell of a concept!
English youngsters Iris (Freya Allan) and Katie (Ruby Barker) are destitute, having been evicted from their rented flat. Things
seem to pick up when Iris receives the news that her estranged father
(Peter Mullan) has passed away, leaving her the pub in Berlin.
It's very much a fixer-upper but Iris decides to hang onto the pub and
make it her new home, as she has nothing going for her back in England.
When a desperate young man, Neil (Jeremy Irvine), arrives and
asks Iris if he can speak to his dead wife, she presumes he's demented.
But when he offers her £4,000 she's happy to humour him. Once in
the basement Iris witnesses the horrifying truth about what she's
inherited.
Like Talk to Me, Baghead cleverly exploits our apprehensions regarding
what awaits us on the other side when our time in this realm is up.
Horror movies are generally about the dead tormenting the living, but
Baghead flips this idea on its head. There's a
skin-crawling cruelty in the notion of bringing someone back to life for
a mere two minutes for the sake of satisfying our curiosity. The dead
people we see temporarily revitalised here are completely unaware of
their demise until it's revealed to them, and we're left to consider the
horror of how they might process this knowledge as they spend infinity
on some other spiritual plane.
We all have questions we might like to ask our deceased loved ones, but
Baghead suggests it's kinder to let the dead rest. The
device of only being able to communicate with the deceased person in
question for two minutes is a smart allegory for how we tend to avoid
getting into deeper conversations with our loved ones for fear of what
might be revealed about our relationships. Characters here are left
wondering if the disturbing things they hear coming from the mouths of
the dead are simply Baghead taunting them or a genuine reflection of the
deceased's true feelings towards them.
For about two thirds of its narrative, Baghead is a
gripping existential horror movie that confronts the sort of questions
that preoccupy both believer and agnostic in equal measure. It's
disappointing then to see it concede to mainstream genre expectations
with a hokey final act that rushes to a clichéd climax with a murderous
toxic male chasing the heroine through a burning building. Its ending
may cause you to shake your head as you leave the cinema, but the ideas
raised by Baghead's central concept just might haunt you on your train ride home.
