I guess sometimes it’s nice to have an idea first, but if somebody else manages to do a better job, then not even the powers of a necro-centric witch can help you out.
In order to throw some clarity on the situation we first have to have a brief history lesson that takes us back to 2017 when Alberto Corredor made the short film Baghead that told the eerie tale of a grieving man who makes a bargin with a witch to communicate with his very dead wife only to suffer predictably supernatural consequences. Now, fastforward ahead to now and we have the feature length version from the same director that expands the story to feature length while adding new wrinkles, characters and all the other stuff you need to stretch out a short film to feature length.
What could possibly hope to thwart the fiendish machinations of an ageless witch who can help desperate souls speak to the spirits of the dead? Uh… anyone out there seen Talk To Me?
Young, destitute, wannabe artist Iris isn’t exactly having a good time of it. Not only has she been ousted from her flat by an impatient landlord by she’s just been informed that her estranged father has been found accidentally burnt to death in the pub he owns in Berlin. Relying on her best friend, Katie, to pay for her plane ticket, Iris heads over to identify the body, but after doing so, she is approached by uber-creepy solicitor who tells her that if she signs a creepy deed, then her father’s creepy pub is all hers.
Having no real option, Iris signs away and before you know it, she’s crashing at the busty bar while the ever-supportive Katie gets over to stick her own opinion in. However, what makes weird events even weirder is a knock on the door from Neil, a grieving young man who claims he had a deal with Iris’ father to visit the twisted, raggedy entity that apparently lives in the pub’s basement. Not only does this story prove to be worryingly accurate, but Neil wants to give Iris £2000 in order to use the creature’s talent of communicating with the dead in order to square things up with his recently deceased wife.
It turns out that there are rules to utilizing this witch’s talent and after you have strapped her down and presented her with an item of the deceased, the bag-headed crone actually transforms into who you want to talk to. However, the catch is (and there’s always a catch) that the dead only have control for two minutes and after that, “Baghead” starts to get stronger.
Despite Katie’s complaints, Iris feels like she can use Baghead to bleed yet more cash out of a desperate Neil, but the more she exploits the tragic creature, the more the balance of power shifts until a chilling truth is realised. Baghead isn’t Iris’ curse, Iris is Baghead’s.
So, to let the witch out of the bag, Baghead isn’t particularly good for many reasons, but the main one proves to be that Danny and Michael Philippou did the concept so much better back in 2022’s Talk To Me. Where Baghead takes a dusty, jump-scare peppered, classic approach, Talk To Me proved to be livelier, scarier and far more innovative when it came to the concept of using supernatural means to chinwag with the deceased and as a result, Alberto Corredor’s movie simply can’t compare despite his novel rejigging of the seance first rearing its head years earlier.
However, you can’t blame everything on Talk To Me, because even if that rousing horror gem didn’t exist, Baghead still has enough issues to stop it a long way short of becoming a classic. Firstly, even though I haven’t yet, to date, seen the original short film, you can almost sense the straining at the seams as the movie tries to expand its story to accommodate a 94 minute running time. As a result, the story feels as disjointed and creaky as the titular witch herself as the script struggles to lay out the whys and wherefore when not going into any backstory at all would have probably have been far spookier. Instead every attempt is made to explain things in a manner that feels extraordinarily tacked on; even the tried and true method of giving Baghead an origin story in the form of animated, medieval drawings complete with an ominous voice over has the stink of something rustled up at the last minute in order to paper up some cracks – worse yet, the movie probably contains the most irritating and stupid cluster of characters I’ve seen in a horror film for quite some time. While Talk To Me made the reckless, youthful idiocy of the main characters part of the theme of the entire film, Baghead’s protagonists just seem like a bunch of oblivious twats. Rules are plainly laid out and then almost immediately broken: no one thinks to stand ready and re-bag Baghead the second the two minute timer goes off, thus letting the mottled hag mouth off and get in people’s heads for up to five extra minutes at a time. Even the annoying, nagging, Katie, the character who is installed to be the supposed voice of reason, suddenly ignores her own advice at one point and does the complete opposite of everything she’s been telling everyone else to do and while the stupidity of humans in movies like this usually enhance the pantomime-esque audience participation, here it just seems lazy. Confronted with this group of dumbasses, Baghead doesn’t even have to try that hard to get the upper hand.
Fallout from this means that your critical eye starts to wander and start questioning other aspects of the story: why, for a film almost set in entirely in Berlin, does not one single person actually speaks their lines in German? Why would a Scotsman open an English pub in Germany and name it the Queen’s Head? Why don’t we see anyone else but the obsessive Neil request the services of Baghead? All the annoying issues build up, cheered on by the movie’s insistence on using cheap jump scares and random loud noises to get a rise out of you.
It’s not all bad. The cinematography is nicely atmospheric, the ending is appropriately downbeat and Baghead herself – while looking an awful lot like many other stringy haired, cealing-crawling wraith that usually populate films like this – boasts a cool design. But as a whole, you feel that someone should have asked its supernatural antagonist to maybe invoke the spirit of Wes Craven or Tobe Hooper and got some pointers on how to make a film like this hang together.
A good premise is wasted on poor plotting and worse characterization and as a result, Baghead should have probably best been left under wraps.
Bag it and tag it.
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