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Baghead ★★½
(M) 94 minutes
The Queen’s Head is nobody’s idea of a cosy pub. It’s a gloomy pile in a gloomy part of town with no regular customers and an unwanted tenant in the basement.
In Baghead Freya Allan plays Iris, who inherits a haunted pub from her father.Credit: StudioCanal
Welcome to Baghead, Spanish director Alberto Corredor’s low-budget horror movie about a creature who has held a grudge against humankind for some 600 years because of the sufferings inflicted on her when she was alive.
Like so many screen monsters, Corredor’s ghost has the ability to bring back the dead to talk to the living – and we all know the trouble that those conversations can cause.
But Iris (The Witcher’s Freya Allan) is clearly a novice when it comes to the horror genre, and when she inherits the pub from her father, she’s deaf to the alarm bells.
Her loyal friend Katie (Ruby Barker) is much more savvy. She has intimations of the nightmare to come after taking one look at the pub, but Iris, who is penniless, is tempted to see if there’s money to be made here. After all, she’s already come across Neil (Jeremy Irvine), a wild-eyed character who knows about the ghost and will pay unlimited amounts of cash for an audience.
Jeremy Irvine, Ruby Barker and Freya Allan in a scene from Baghead.Credit: StudioCanal
Corredor, who based the film on a short he made in 2017, says his taste for horror stems from the psychological insights it can toss up. It’s a view shared by a cluster of Latin directors which includes Corredor’s compatriot, J A Bayona. His international career was launched with his genuinely spooky haunted house movie, The Orphanage (2007), but Corredor’s technique is a lot less subtle than Bayona’s. The closing of every door resounds like a thunderclap and the score might well have been spliced together from a perpetually rising crescendo of shrieks and whines. A touch of class, however, is bestowed by the presence of Peter Mullan as Iris’s father, from whom she had been estranged for years.
Mullan, who first became known through his work with Ken Loach, possesses craggy looks and the kind of concentrated intensity that injects any scene with a shot of adrenaline. While he dies in the opening sequence, you know he’ll be back, and it doesn’t take long. First up, he appears in a video recorded just before his death, describing the ghost and the ground rules for dealing with her. It seems that he, too, has been charging the desperate for a chance to talk to the dead.