As soon as a horror movie lays out rules, you know those rules are going to be broken. In the first scene of 2023’s Baghead we see Peter Mullen taking to the camera as he records a video of such rules for the next owner of his pub to observe. We’re only a couple of minutes in, and the casual viewer already knows some of the directions the story will go in. Not all the directions, mind you, but enough to drain many scenes of any suspense.
I’m not sure if Mullan’s pub ever operated in the capacity such an establishment normally would. Instead, he has a woman trapped in the basement who can bring the dead back to talk to the living, assuming that person’s form and image for two minutes. To summon a person, Baghead consumes an object the deceased owned. She spits out the item after that time, which is awfully considerate of her. Mullan charges 2,000 pounds for each customer who wants to use this service to speak to somebody who has died. Outside of that time, she wears a burlap bag over her head, hence the title.
The more Baghead is used, the more power she gains over her guardian. Exhausted from her torments, Mullan tries to set the woman on fire, but she turns the tables on him. We see him pulling himself up the stairs from the basement, engulfed in very CGI flames. But, once again, that evil, though courteous, presence extinguishes those flames as soon as his life is extinguished. I say the Forestry Service should ditch Smokey the Bear and consider this supernatural being as a new mascot: “Only you can prevent pub fires.”
His daughter (Freya Allen) inherits the pub. When we first she her, this starving artist and a friend (Ruby Barker) are breaking into the apartment she has been evicted from, so as to rescue some of her belongings. Learning of the pub, she is grateful to have inherited a place where she can live, even if she despises the father who had been absent from her life.
I think the first sign for Allen that something is amiss should be the creepy-ass lawyer (Ned Dennehy) who has her sign the lease for the property, and who gives her the videotape Mullan had been recording. To sign, he hands her an old pen of the kind that has a nib you actually dip into an ink well. If somebody in this day and age has you sign a document using anything but a completely modern ball-point pen or something similar, there is something very wrong.
At least this man, who has such antediluvian habits, is aware of video technology, even if it is VHS. He hands Allen the tape Mullan has recorded, which is how she learns about the rules. In the pub afterwards, she goes as far as getting to the basement door, which is covered in runes, without going inside.
Her behavior at this point baffles me, and is one of the first of the fatal flaws in the film. She watches a videotape where her dad says he has a woman trapped in the basement and she does not do either of the first things most people would do, which are: 1) call the police and 2) check in on the situation in the basement.
In fact, she doesn’t go into the basement until the next night, when she accepts Jeremy Irvine’s payment of ten times the usual fare for a Baghead session. Irvine had actually broken into the pub on Allen’s first night there, which should have been the first sign something is very wrong. He claims he just wants to summon his dead wife so he can give her the final goodbye he wasn’t able to do previously, and so obtain closure. It is no surprise his intentions are more nefarious than that.
Barker has since showed up, and so is the voice of reason Allen refuses to acknowledge. Allen thinks she can confine Baghead to the basement by painting the words “DO NOT CROSS” on one of the steps. That may restrict the supernatural being from physically leaving the basement, but it doesn’t stop her from invading Allen’s thoughts and dreams and even controlling physical objects in the outside world. So, really, why even bother trying to keep her in the basement?
Similarly, there is the absurdity of continuing to strap her wrists to the arms of a chair she sits in, when she can simply disappear and reappear anywhere she wants in her space. She especially likes to hang out on ceilings, which CGI beings in this kind of film tend to do. It’s like they’re all obsessed with that old Lionel Ritchie hit and want to try “Dancing on the Ceiling” as often as possible.
It is very difficult to talk about Baghead without saying anything that might give away the ending, as there is a genuine surprise in the final minutes I did not anticipate. Alas, this leads to a development I did not believe, as it relies on a curious loophole of contractual agreements I do not believe would be observed by conventional law nor by supernatural regulations. But, hey, just like the rules Mullan establishes on the tape he left for Allen, all rules established in a horror film will be broken.
Dir: Alberto Corredor
Starring Freya Allen, Jeremy Irvine, Ruby Barker, Peter Mullan
Watched on Shudder