is a horror film directed by Alberto Corredor starring Freya Allan and Jeremy Irvine.
“Baghead” is one of those gothic horror movies with witches and legend stories reaching out to the characters from a bygone era. It might be that the effects do not work, the actors do not fully believe the script, or simply, we have seen similar stories too many times before. Simply put, a horror movie that fails to scare or fully develop.
Plot
A girl inherits an old pub from her deceased father that, coincidentally, comes with an extra: in the basement, there’s a witch that allows to communicate with the dead. The girl discovers that it’s she who controls the witch and she starts to unveil the ancient history of the witch.
About the movie
A movie that’s based on a short film by the same director, Alberto Corredor, proposes a novelty: the ghost isn’t as terrifying as Sadako (The Ring), but coexists with the characters and, almost, interacts with them more naturally. An original concept that, nevertheless, clashes with the general premise of the movie, which bets everything on the most traditional and gothic horror of witches and haunted houses (or English pub in this case). They quickly reveal the supernatural, which appears in the first sequence when the witch comes out of her hiding place. The rest of the movie is the story we are told.
And this rest of the movie, aside from a couple of plot twists almost at the end, is a bit “the usual”: an ancient story that conditions reality and an old sect that abused the witch. Some ghostly appearance and a few well-executed scenes of the witch combined with a couple of scary sequences that, unfortunately, fail and literally, don’t scare at all.
A couple of sequences in the key scenes of this type of film cause the downfall of the general idea, which wasn’t bad in any case. On the other hand, it is a story too overused with a plot that we have seen a thousand times before and that necessarily needs some element that distinguishes it from this pile-up of previous witchcraft stories: “Baghead” aims to be a classic movie and nearly succeeds in its entirety, but without achieving that distinctive element that makes it shine.
As for the gothic atmosphere, it faces the same issue: it partially achieves it, without fully blending the good location into a photographic atmosphere that complements it. Perhaps too much light or that darkness that isn’t dark enough or those sets that, in the general tone of a failed movie, give us the impression of accompanying the whole and also ending up failed.
Our opinion
A movie that falls short in most of its aspects and that, essentially, fails to deliver in a horror movie that, ends up not being scary.
