Possession horror flick Baghead channels a roulette wheel of spirits into tenuous vessels

Not every film needs to reinvent the wheel. Especially when it comes to horror, that wheel can be, itself, a cycle of the same stories returning to the front of our collective fears, as culture churns through another existential cycle. It’s why so many storylines from the ur-text for weird predicament storytelling—the original Twilight Zone of course—can always be welcomed in from the cold, no matter how little they’ve been redressed for the occasion.

Baghead, the new horror film from director Alberto Corredor, brings the well-tread material of “communicating with the Other Side goes terribly wrong” to the screen with a Faustian, capitalist twist. A setup that had the feature high on our “most anticipated films of ’24” list is, unfortunately, not clever enough to overcome drastic shortcomings elsewhere. It’s a disappointment, but hopefully just the first strike out in a horror voice with better work ahead.

Following the death of her estranged father (Peter Mullan), Iris (Freya Allan) learns she has inherited a run-down, centuries-old pub. She travels to Berlin to identify her father’s body and meet with The Solicitor (Ned Dennehy) to discuss the estate. Little does she know, when the deed is signed, she will become inextricably tied to an unspeakable entity that resides in the pub’s basement–Baghead–a shape-shifting creature that can transform into the dead. Two thousand in cash for two minutes with the creature is all it takes for desperate loved ones to ease their grief. Neil (Jeremy Irvine), who has lost his wife, is Iris’ first customer. Like her father, Iris is tempted to exploit the creature’s powers and help desperate people for a price. But she soon discovers breaking the two-minute rule can have terrifying consequences. Together with her best friend Katie (Ruby Barker), Iris must battle to keep control of Baghead and figure out how to destroy her, before she destroys them.

A lot of ideas at play here seem like the making of a serious, expectation defying narrative. Seance-possession films like Talk to Me and Brooklyn 45 has been some of the highlights of the last year in horror cinema. Corredor here does an inverse opposite, where the living are reaching out with specific dead souls in mind, in hopes of resolving their own traumas. Everything from the parallels of sex work to the delight to be had when charlatans turn out to be truthful to simply the bit about inheriting “the family business” without skipping a beat—all of this feels like a hard to fumble set of twists with such open-ended potential.

Unfortunately, Baghead is made or broken by the sum of its parts, and its shot in the foot by feeding a limited series of empty, depthless characters into the plot machine.

While shot beautifully and incorporating some jittery creature work, the dialogue really lets down the actors, who are clearly doing the best they can with the material. You can see the bones here of a much stronger work, and with Baghead being expanded from a well-regarded short film to a full length feature, the filmmakers simply rushed in with filler. It’s a shame, because the ideas that are explored could have wound up in some dreadful, horrifying conclusions. Instead, we’ve got this.

Baghead streams on Shudder beginning April 5.