Come To Daddy (at MONSTER FEST ’19) ★★★½

THE wonderfully named Kiwi director Ant Timpson makes an auspicious debut with the creepily effective and off-beat horror film Come To Daddy.

This 2019 release could be described as Psycho by the Coen brothers with a narrative mystery injected with dark comic moments.

It’s a tricky stunt, but Timpson and his writer Toby Harvard (The Greasy Strangler) execute with style, helped by a terrific bunch of performances and a stunning location on the edge of the Canadian wilderness coastline.

In fact the main set, a rambling home perched on the edge of a small cliff, does suggest the home in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho when shot from below. There is a great example of this early in the film when the main character, Norval, stops on some rocks with his suitcase in hand to survey what lies ahead.

Played extremely well by Elijah Wood, Norval is a quirky-looking, polite young man who has answered a letter from his natural father to come and see him. Norval is in his early-30s and hasn’t seen his father since he was five when he deserted the family.

He is confronted with an eccentric alcoholic, George (Stephen McHattie), who is friendly at first but becomes increasingly confrontational as Norval keeps questioning him as to why he wants to see him and why he left them so many years ago.

To reveal more would be to spoil the key entertaining elements of the film with twists in the plot creating plenty of suspense and the characters’ increasing eccentricities adding further to the audiences’ feeling of not knowing what is going to happen at any moment in time.

Wood is good as always and the under-rated McHattie delivers another gem of a performance. Without giivng away anything, the always interesting Michael Donovan joins the proceedings at one point as does irish actor Michael Smiley who is gloriously over-the-top.