Director: Benjamin Barfoot
Grief takes a monstrous shape in Daddy's Head, a 2024 British horror feature from director Benjamin Barfoot that turns mourning into a slow, unsettling haunting.
What is Daddys Head about?
Weeks after a sudden death in the family, a widow and her withdrawn stepson try to settle back into an ordinary routine inside a large, half-empty countryside house. Their attempt at normalcy falls apart when something starts appearing at night that looks almost exactly like the man they lost. It knows the house, it knows their habits, and it seems to want back in. As the visits grow bolder and stranger, the stepmother has to decide whether to trust what she is seeing or protect the boy from a presence that might be wearing a familiar face for reasons that are anything but comforting.
Cast & crew
Julia Brown anchors the film as the stepmother forced to question her own eyes, with Nathaniel Martello-White as the boy caught between memory and fear. Rupert Turnbull, Charles Aitken, Mary Woodvine, Kaisa Hammarlund, Ako Mitchell, and Deepica Stephen round out a small, tightly wound cast that keeps the story feeling intimate rather than sprawling.
Context & significance
Barfoot builds the film around a creature-horror premise rooted in domestic grief rather than jump-scare spectacle, using practical effects and a muted color palette to keep the family's isolated home feeling both familiar and wrong. At 97 minutes, the pacing favors dread that accumulates gradually over one that peaks early, which has made it a talking point among horror fans who prize atmosphere over gore. The screenplay leans on the uncanny-valley discomfort of a loved one's face returning slightly wrong, letting small physical details carry more weight than dialogue, and the sound design keeps the house itself feeling like a character that is always listening.
Where & how to watch
Daddy's Head is available to stream on K-Time with a free account login, presented with a Persian-dubbed audio track and a fully Farsi interface designed for Persian-speaking audiences watching from anywhere in the world.