Baghead (2023)

Baghead arrives with the confidence of a film that believes its monster is enough. A young woman named Iris inherits a centuries-old Berlin pub from a father she barely knew, signs the deed, and promptly becomes the legal custodian of a shape-shifting creature sealed behind a basement wall. The creature speaks for the dead. The dead, as ever, have complaints. There is a two-minute limit on conversations, a solicitor who cannot be located, a brotherhood that burned a conjurer four hundred years ago, and a great deal of running through rock corridors. The machinery is elaborate. The scares are not.

Assessed against the cultural markers of the current moment, the film is a near-total abstention. The cast is drawn from standard European genre stock, and no effort is made to interrogate that choice. Race goes unmentioned. So do queerness, climate, body image, neurodivergence, and the moral status of inherited property, which the film treats as a plot device instead of a thesis. The single faint signal is Iris herself, a woman who gains command over a malevolent force through the mere fact of ownership. That is a power dynamic dressed as folklore, not a social argument, and the film never develops it. The entity, after all, is the one orchestrating everything. Agency is the twist, not the theme.

The remainder is a lean supernatural thriller that critics found thin, and they were not wrong. The Berlin setting sits there unexplained, a Scottish publican tending an English-named pub in a city where almost nobody speaks German. Peter Bradshaw noted the resemblance to Talk to Me, and the comparison is unkind. Baghead has an intriguing premise, a committed lead, and no interest whatsoever in saying anything. On the evidence, it is a film about a hole in a wall. That is not a criticism. It is a classification.