Dir. Ant Timpson. 96 minutes.
3/5
After three decades, Norval (Elijah Wood) is to reunite with his estranged father at the latter’s out-of-the-way beach house. But this family reunion isn’t everything Norval had hoped for: his father (Stephen McHattie), it turns out, is a weather-beaten, foul-mouthed old codger with a hair-trigger temper. Norval’s dad can’t explain his 30-year absence — or the mysterious rumbling noises coming from behind the house’s walls.
Not everyone knows that Elijah Wood is a stupendous horror actor. In 2012’s “Maniac,” he provoked our sympathy for a scalp-collecting psychopath; here, he exudes the anxiety and guilt of a millennial son confronting his boomer father across a seemingly unbridgeable gap. Norval is a teetotaler; his dad takes slugs of whisky. Norval has a carefully maintained Portlandish mustache and bowl cut; his father’s locks are tangled and sun-bleached. But is the older generation tougher, or just meaner?
This father-son bonding quickly develops, through an intricate series of plot twists, into a surprisingly disgusting horror movie. At times the macabre humor is a little too weird for its own good — one scene features an act of lobotomy-by-memo-spindle — but it never feels like a crutch for the writing, which remains sharp throughout. Like most good horror films, “Come to Daddy” is thematically rich enough to offer more than mere spectacle.
