The Shudder original horror film Dad's head was met with acclaim upon its release on October 11, hailed as a deeply disturbing portrait of the horrors of grief. The horror-focused streamer has developed a reputation for releasing some highly watchable films under their own name, and Dad's head is the latest in their already strong lineage. The film tells the story of a young boy and his stepmother grieving the loss of their beloved patriarch who becomes the target of a mysterious shape-shifting entity. It garnered attention for its eerie atmosphere, strong performances, and terrifying creature design. After a descent into grief (and monster-driven) mania threatens to destroy this already fractured family, writer/director Benjamin Barfoot delivers a surprisingly hopeful ending.
Dad's head plays out almost like a dark fairy tale, focusing on a young boy named Isaac (Rupert Turnbull), who has just lost his father James (Charles Aitken) in a devastating car accident, after losing his mother a few years earlier. James' new, younger wife Laura (Julia Brown) tries to comfort Isaac, but finds it hard to see through her own grief and spends her nights in a drunken haze. It's not long before Isaac is visited by a strange creature who assumes an eerie resemblance to his late father's face and tries to lure the grieving boy into the woods and into a strange geometric wooden structure. Convinced that his father has returned in a new form, Isaac becomes almost drawn into whatever plans the creature has for him.
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Daddy's Head's Climax
At climax of daddy's head, Laura is pushed to the brink after the family dog turns up dead and her helpful friend Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White) is attacked and nearly killed when Isaac lures him to the creature's lair. In the end, she decides that she cannot be the mother that Isaac needs and decides to relinquish custody of the boy. Shortly thereafter, the creature infiltrates Isaac's room, when Laura catches it red-handed and is briefly knocked unconscious when the creature slams the door shut.
Isaac then finally sees the monster for what it is, and calls out to Laura for help. Recovering from her head injury, Laura stumbles into Isaac's room and, finding a kitchen knife that had gone missing earlier in the film, stabs the monster repeatedly, causing it to flee. The scene culminates with Isaac screaming Laura's name as she stares blankly ahead in shock.
Daddy's Head's Moving Coda
Instead of showing the audience the immediate aftermath of the attack, Barfoot instead changes the plot completely, as a young man (James Harper-Jones) sits in the remains of Isaac's childhood room, staring at the air duct where he encountered the creature. Next, the young man walks through the woods near the house, finds the dilapidated ruins of the creature's lair, and finally enters. In the inner chamber, he finds a picture of Isaac's father and a strange, faceless skeleton belonging to the creature, which apparently died from its injuries. He studies the empty space where a face should be, then leaves. Finally, he goes back inside and knocks on his mother's bedroom door, asking if he can come in. When his mother wakes up, the audience sees that it's a slightly older version of Laura, suggesting that the young man we've been following is in fact Isaac, and the two stuck together after their disturbing ordeal.
For a film dealing with such terrifying, surreal imagery and heavy subject matter, this final scene is a surprisingly hopeful and even positive coda to the story. It suggests that Isaac and Laura bonded over their terrifying experience, and Laura was able to find the deep wells of strength she needed to save Isaac and also step up and be his mother. Instead of being torn apart by the creature that exploits his grief, Isaac seems to have grown into a young man who bears the scars of his experience, but doesn't let it destroy or define him. The significance of the creature's skeleton fits into the film's larger musings on grief. It never really goes away, but over time its influence over a person's life can diminish. It allows Isaac to see the monster for what it really was: not his father, as he might have hoped, but a faceless creature that sought to assume his appearance for its own purposes.
Barefoot leaves a lot of Dad's head open to interpretation. The monster's true intentions for Isaac are never fully revealed, and the impact of the experience on Isaac's life going forward is only hinted at. Through its quiet, hopeful resolution, the film suggests that while grief and loss are inevitable, everyone has the capacity to choose how to move on from that experience. Will they let it define them, or will they integrate it and move on?
After such a relentlessly dark and terrifying film, it was a smart idea from Barfoot to end the story with a ray of hope. Many horror stories have explored the topic of grief in recent years, and many of them are enjoyable Hereditary or Pet Sematary, see their characters consumed by it. Dad's head manage to separate themselves by choosing a different path, where grief can unite as much as divide.
