Producers: Matthew James Wilkinson and Patrick Tolan   Director: Benjamin Barfoot   Screenplay: Benjamin Barfoot   Cast: Julia Brown, Rupert Turnbull, Charles Aitken, Nathaniel Martello-White, Nila Aalia, Matthew Allen and James Harper-Jones   Distributor: Shudder

Grade: B

The new feature by multi-hyphenate Benjamin Barfoot—he’s responsible for the editing and music score, as well as writing and directing it—is a moodily effective psychological horror film in which profound bereavement creates a fearsome threat, whether real or imagined.

The person being mourned is James (Charles Aitken), who’s introduced lying in a hospital bed swathed in bandages and connected to a respirator, the victim of a car crash from which he’s unlikely to recover.  His young wife Laura (Julia Brown) accepts the doctors’ advice that she unplug the machine and let him go.  His death is traumatic for her, but even more so for his son Isaac (Rupert Turnbull), who’d lost his biological mother not long before; Laura is his stepmother, and they’ve never been close. 

Now they’re left to share the large modernist house James, a renowned architect, had built in a dense forest, far from town.  They express their grief in different ways.  Laura turns to wine, slipping into a stupor as she watches home movies of James, Isaac and herself in happier days.  Isaac is obsessed with playing a handheld video game that was a gift from his father.  Their only companion is a dog called Bella. 

Since Isaac has no blood relatives, Laura is confronted with the decision of becoming his legal guardian or handing him over to the child welfare service.  Her mother suggests the latter would be the better course, but Robert (Nathaniel Martello-White), a close family friend, recommends that she give it more thought. 

He also tries to encourage Isaac to rouse himself and start living again.  But that’s not easy when the boy—and Laura, too—glimpse a threatening apparition outside the house, to which Bella reacts with snarls that become more forceful as the thing appears inside, first as a pulsating mass underneath a table and then in more human-like form.   Isaac hears a voice growling his name, saying he’s special and enticing him to come into the woods.  He begins scrawling odd drawings on the walls of his room, and hearing something scraping on the other side of the air vent there.  When he sees Robert and Laura sharing a moment together, he adds anger to the mix.  Then James’s grave is vandalized.  The culmination comes after the boy discovers a peculiar structure in the forest, a sort of tunnel made from trees with a triangular entrance.  It must have been built by James, and what it contains isn’t revealed until a coda in which an older Isaac (James Harper-Jones), whom we’d seen in a prologue staring at the air vent he’d brooded over years earlier, finally investigates the interior.  But before then young Isaac has taken Robert there.

“Daddy’s Head” isn’t without its moments of shock, its jump scares.  And it gives us brief sightings of its creature, an amalgam of practical effects involving a shrouded man (Matthew Allen) and VFX elements that envelop him in haze.  But the emphasis is on establishing an atmosphere of dread and ratcheting up tension as the apparitions grow more insistent and Isaac ever more disturbed. 

The film is basically a two-hander, and both Brown and Turnbull deliver powerful turns.  Brown’s is more emotionally charged—Laura is, after all, a very young woman, in many ways still a child herself, and devastated by the sudden loss of the older man she’d married and, presumably, depended upon.  Turnbull, by contrast, conveys the sullenness of a boy, an introvert by nature, who has already endured the death of his mother and is now stunned by a second unimaginable tragedy. 

The third major character is the mood fashioned by Barfoot with the aid of production designer Declan Price and cinematographer Miles Ridgway.  The sterile interior of the house is contrasted with the dark gloominess of the forest beyond the clearing in which it’s built, and the smooth, leisurely camera movements are violently interrupted by the sudden eruptions of panic and terror.  The effect is unnerving, keeping the viewer on tenterhooks throughout.

Whether or not you find the ambiguous ending fully satisfying (or even immediately intelligible), you’ll certainly be unsettled by the grim, carefully judged buildup to it.

Producers: Tom Ackerley, Margot Robbie, Josey McNamara and Steven Rales   Director: Megan Park Screenplay: Megan Park   Cast:  Maisy Stella, Aubrey Plaza, Percy Hynes White, Maddie Ziegler, Kerrice Brooks, Maria Dizzia, Seth Isaac Johnson, Alain Goulem, Carter Trozzolo and Alexandria Rivera    Distributor: Amazon MGM Studios

Grade: B

Megan Park’s second feature is an old-fashioned fantasy transferred to the present day, a coming-of-age tale with a magical twist based on a premise that’s not exactly original but is played out engagingly by a winning cast.  The title could be better, though.

Elliott Labrant (vivid, exuberant Maisy Stella) is just turning eighteen, and looking forward to going off to college in Toronto.  She’s spending the final weeks before then not so much with her parents, Kathy (Maria Dizzia) and Tom (Alain Goulem) and brothers Max (Seth Isaac Johnson) and Spencer (Carter Trozzolo), though she does help out on the family’s cranberry farm from time to time.  Instead, she cruises the lake on the boat she’ll soon be selling, goofs around with her pals Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) and Ro (Kerrice Brooks), and snuggles occasionally with her friend Chelsea (Alexandria Rivera), a bartender at the lakeside restaurant.  She never thinks about boys, because she’s always been attracted to girls.

So it’s not surprising that she skips the birthday dinner Kathy’s prepared, complete with cake, preferring to go off with Ruthie and Ro for a nighttime camp-out.  They’ve acquired some hallucinogenic mushrooms and are going to space out on them.  Each reacts differently, but Elliott’s experience is the most peculiar: she’ visited by her thirty-nine year old self (Aubrey Plaza, world-weary and circumspect, though as snarky as the young version), whom she takes to be a product of the mushrooms but in fact is very real, even providing her cellphone number so that they can text.  She does offer some advice: spend time with your mom and dad, and even with Max, with whom you have little in common.  And by the way, don’t get involved with anybody named Chad.

After she and her pals return and she makes things up with her parents, Elliott follows her older self’s suggestions to a considerable extent.  She has a heart-to-heart with her mother and even goes golfing with Max, who’s doubtful about her motives.  But though her efforts bear some fruit, she also finds out about plans involving the family farm that unnerve her.

In a major way, though, she ignores the older her.  She resumes her boat trips, and while swimming one day bumps into a charming young guy who introduces himself as the grandson of the man who owns the farm next door.  His name, of course, is Chad (Percy Hynes White), and against all her expectations—and inclinations—she finds herself attracted to him, something her girlfriends find as astonishing as she does.  And when he does some work on her family’s crops, they get even closer.  She contacts old Elliott for more information on her warning, but her texts go unanswered, and when her older self reappears in propria persona, as it were, it’s only after some prodding that she reveals the reason behind her anti-Chad prohibition. 

Thankfully Park doesn’t bother with trying to provide an explanation for Elliott’s experience with her older self, though the latter does observe that she doesn’t seem to deal with drugs very well.  You either accept what’s happening or you don’t. 

If you do, though, you’ll find “My Old Ass” an agreeable fable that touches on the turmoil associated with growing up without getting preachy about it—and delivering a bittersweet twist at the close.  It’s a pretty gossamer thing, without much emotional heft, but that keeps it from becoming heavy-handed and mawkish. 

And the cast is first-rate.  Stella is great, making one root for Elliott despite the fact that like any eighteen-year-old, she can be a pain at times, and though Chad isn’t portrayed with nearly as much depth, White makes him an enormously ingratiating fellow.  As the ultimate inside outsider, Plaza might not be completely convincing as Stella some twenty years on, but she nicely embodies a somewhat curdled version of the young Elliott’s attitudes.  The rest of the cast is excellent down the line, with Dizzia particularly good as the solicitous Kathy.

This is hardly a slickly packaged picture, but cinematographer Kristen Correll makes good use of the Ontario locations, production designer Zazu Myers fashions a plausible backdrop, composers Tyler Hilton and Jaro Caraco deliver a pleasant score, and editor Jennifer Vecchiarello keeps things moving so that you won’t puzzle overmuch about matters the plot fails to address.

In all, this is a smart little movie that doesn’t belabor the points it’s making and, buoyed by an excellent cast, will leave you feeling pretty good about life, even when it might draw a tear about things not always ending up as you might like.