A man travels to a remote cabin to see his estranged father, but arrives just as his dad’s shady past is returning to haunt him. A film by Ant Timpson, starring Elijah Wood, Stephen McHattie, Michael Smiley, Madeleine Sami, and Martin Donovan.
COME to DADDY
Ant Timpson
(2020)
Norval Greenwood (Elijah Wood) is a musician living with his mother in Beverly Hills. One day. he unexpectedly receives a letter with a handdrawn map from his father, who abandoned him at age 5, inviting him to visit his lakeside home in Oregon.
When Norval arrives, his father (Stephen McHattie ) seems strangely surprised to see him, though he welcomes him into the house. As time passes, his father begins to exhibit increasingly bizarre and hostile behavior, constantly belittling him. Things come to a head when his father attempts to kill him, only to suddenly die of a heart attack.
Norval reports the incident to local authorities, but no units are available at the moment. The operator promises to send someone to his location on Friday. The next day, Port Hope County Sheriff Ronald Plum (Garfield Wilson) arrives to examine the body and take Norval’s statement. Although Ronald initially suspects Norval, after looking into his eyes, he concludes that Norval is innocent based on his personal theory that criminals typically have eyes that look like raisins. Norval then remarks that his deceased father did, in fact, have raisin-like eyes.
The local coroner, Gladys (Madeleine Sami), arrives to conduct an investigation and prepare the body for embalming. She explains to Norval that she will drain the blood and inject preservatives, but due to flooding issues at the town morgue, she’ll need to return the body to the house afterward. Gladys insists that the body must remain at the house while the family makes funeral arrangements.
Now alone in the house, Norval starts hearing strange noises that wake him in the middle of the night. One day, he discovers a hidden family photo album that reveals a shocking truth: the man who just died wasn’t his real father.
Determined to find the source of the mysterious sounds, he searches the house until he finds a hidden entrance beneath a coffee table. Inside, he discovers a secret bunker where a man is being held captive. At this point, you might have guessed that the bloodied man chained up in the bunker is Norval’s real father.
Norval’s father Brian (Martin Donovan) urges him to kill the bad guys who are coming to hurt him. Brian warns that if Norval doesn’t do as he’s told, they’ll both be killed. When they hear the hatch opening, signaling someone entering the bunker, Brian tells Norval to hide and wait for the right moment to strike. A man (Michael Smiley) appears and threatens to stab Brian with a pen covered in excrement unless Brian reveals what he wants to know. Brian repeats his earlier answer to Gordon, insisting that everything is gone. Norval attacks the man with a dumbbell, but the man manages to escape the bunker, only to discover Gordon’s corpse in the house. The man vows to return with his little friend for both of them.
Brian reveals that after abandoning young Norval and his mother, he fled to Bangkok where he and three other men — Jethro (Michael Smiley), Dandy (Simon Chin), and Gordon (Stephen McHattie ) — kidnapped the daughter of Thailand’s richest man and successfully collected a massive ransom. Brian then betrayed his partners by fleeing with their shares of the money and has been in hiding ever since. He confesses that all the money is now gone, then asks Norval if he ever wondered how he grew up in a Beverly Hills mansion with an unemployed mother, implying that he had been secretly supporting them with the stolen money.
Directed by New Zealand filmmaker Ant Timpson from a screenplay written by Toby Harvard, COME to DADDY is an unusual film that defies easy categorization.
While it appears to be a thriller, it’s not quite that simple. It has elements of black comedy, but the humor is peculiar – funny yet somewhat not quite funny. For example, the scene where the protagonist tries to free the handcuffed man by breaking his thumb and index finger, only to realize the handcuffs were simply attached to a chain hanging on the wall’s hook.
The ending, which attempts a predictable twist, feels unsatisfying. Personally, I found the early portions of the film featuring the performances of Stephen McHattie and Elijah Wood more intriguing than the latter half.
COME to DADDY premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival on 25 April 2019. The was theatrically released in the United States on 7 February 2020.
