Come to Daddy (2020) Dir. Ant Timpson

Elijah Wood and Stephen McHattie star in this eclectic flick about a young man who, after receiving a cryptic request letter, visits his estranged father’s clifftop residence to rekindle their dead-end family ties.

Director Timpson produced The Greasy Strangler and Deathgasm so has already dabbled in dark comedy and opens his debut with Wood and the drunk McHattie locking horns over family responsibility and fatherly failings. Swearing, boozing and throwing insults at each other, McHattie suddenly drops down dead during a heated argument.

With his porn-star ‘tache and piercing blue eyes, Wood has made a bit of a habit of the disturbed loner (Sin City, Maniac, Eternal Sunshine) and delivers the appropriate goods again here. However, his fine performance doesn’t gel with a film that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, moving as it does from plucky Sunshine State-style indie, through thought-provoking family satire and then a big swing to murderous drama.

With the morgue full and Wood forced to take care of the body until arrangements can be made, it’s sadly not until two-thirds of the way in do we finally get some much-needed narrative oomph with some shocking family revelations.

But it’s too often a strange and haphazard mess despite some gory developments as the truth comes to light. Unfortunately then, the stark changes in tone simply prove frustrating in this schizophrenic flick about failed fatherhood.

★★

Michael Sales