Come to Daddy
COME TO DADDY - SABAN FILMS
Ant Timpson’s Come to Daddy is a surreal and strange piece of cinema that wears its genre influences on its sleeve, with a twisting and turning narrative that constantly delivers an engaging and darkly hilarious film.
Elijah Wood plays the film’s lead Norval Greenwood, a mostly mute DJ with an immediate air of mystery about him who travels to see his estranged father for the first time in many years after receiving a vague and cryptic letter from him. Elijah Wood is no stranger to low-key, indie Genre movies as of late, and has spent the last decade or so carefully picking the projects he both stars in and produces. In doing this, Wood’s career has elevated from fading into blockbuster obscurity to “Indie darling” status. His involvement with Come to Daddy is yet another success with an innocent and naïve performance that works so well precisely because the audience knows exactly who this actor is.
It goes without saying that throughout the course of the film Norval’s father Gordon doesn’t seem to be all that Norval expected, and the audience is given more than enough hints that there’s a lot more to the situation than a father wanting to make amends with his estranged son. To spoil the film’s twists would be to detract from the experience of watching it. Writer/director Ant Timpson cleverly crafts the screenplay to take the audience on a journey and runs the gamut of genres in doing so successfully. There’s psychological horror, paranormal horror, dark humour and all-out comedy with an all-knowing awareness of the tropes and clichés that comes with each of these allows Timpson to keep the viewer on their toes.
Filmmakers have several reasons for wanting to make a film. Ant Timpson has said that writing this film was therapy for him following the death of his father the body, which had been brought home by his partner following his passing in order to spend some final time together. This meant that Timpson was living in a house with his father’s body downstairs for a week, and he said naturally that this strange experience led to a difficult yet cathartic time for him during which he concocted the ideas for this film.
This is perhaps what leads to Come to Daddy’s most successful achievement; amidst the gratuitous genre-hopping of Horror, Comedy, Splatter and the rest, it is an achingly personal Character Drama – a screenplay driven by a fascination with life, death, and their place in the world. If there’s anything negative to say about the film, it’s perhaps that it devolves a little too much into the world of Splatter. This takes away from the strong work done earlier on, but even that is only likely to bother a certain amount of people who may not be on board with the film anyway. Come to Daddy is entertaining and funny with enough pathos and human-driven drama to forgive any of its shortcomings.