Come to Daddy (2019)

Ant Timpson's Come to Daddy arrives from Tribeca with an 86 percent approval rating and a body count that renders such metrics decorative. Elijah Wood plays Norval Greenwood, a wealthy Beverly Hills musician who travels to an Oregon coastal cabin to meet the father who abandoned him at five. What follows is not a reunion but a bait and switch: a meat cleaver, a heart attack, a corpse kept in the living room for want of morgue space, and a bunker beneath the floorboards holding the actual parent. Toby Harvard's screenplay treats this as comedy, which it is, in the way a bear trap is a solution to a foot problem.

The film is lean to the point of emaciation and has no interest in instructing anyone about anything. Race goes unmentioned. The supporting cast includes a few non-white faces in roles that carry no commentary, and the film lets them be. Women exist at the periphery, most memorably a sex worker who participates in a stabbing and then vanishes, a plot device in a film that regards all of its characters as plot devices. There is no environmental sermon, no critique of the ransom economy that funds Norval's comfortable life, no therapeutic vocabulary applied to his suicide attempt. His awkwardness is texture, not diagnosis.

That refusal is the film's discipline. It is nasty, funny, and brief, and it ends with a son lying beside a dying father by a lake, apologizing for something he could not have controlled. The moment lands without a line of moral instruction attached to it. We are left with a small, mean, well-made picture that trusts violence and absurdity to do the talking, and declines, with dignity, to tell us how to feel about any of it.