Daddy’s Girl is a deliciously gruesome and ghoulish ride (if your a guy) into your deepest, darkest fears, where reality and imagination merge into a horrific heart stopping series of final events that will have your suspicions and fears realized with such a stunning ferocity, not often depicted on the screen I might add, that you could be fooled into thinking you were watching your own bloody nightmare murder, made real.
Daddy’s Girl is a mediation on your “Life’s Blood”, how important it is to you and who else might be interested in it.
Nearly a two-tone colour pallet combined with stark, other worldly and unfriendly locations, begin to un-nerve you from the word go. Filmed in dreamlike sequences, the exterior world is there, angular, sharp, grey, concrete and the interiors are usually plush, designer, scarlet, crimson and black, very dimly lit affairs, but these all just go to create a background platform space for the human creatures, you are about to be introduced to over the following 90 mins. Filmed in Wales, with an Arts Council Grant, it is painfully slow for the first two-thirds but if you can stay with it, the last act is very rewarding.
Jaime Winstone is perfectly chilling and brilliant in her role as “Nina”, guided intuitively well by Director D.J. Evans, “Nina” is the self-harming, psychotic suicidal teenager, under the observation of Psychiatrist, “Stephen” played low key by Richard Harrington. “Stephen” is a gifted but inexperienced young Doctor just getting over a serious family trauma, his own wife had recently committed suicide, by cutting her wrists in the bath, she haunts him in his old flat, returning to warn him. Mark Lewis Jones is “Eisner”, Head of Department at the hospital who gives Stephen the case of “Nina” to help him to focus on his work and to help him rebuild his life and failing career. Louise Delamere is “Liz”, “Nina’s” mother seemingly determined to get her daughter medical help at any cost, manipulative and controlling, she seduces “Stephen”, not because she feels sorry for him but because she wants him for another purpose.
It’s a real slow burner and one of the best little UK horror films I have seen in a while, really very good actually.
If your taste in horror is dark and despairing with scenes of unrelenting graphic violence towards the end then this film is for you. There was a bit of “viral” disgust aired by a few people over this film around the internet, as to the fact the film was depraved in it’s handling of the subject matter. I like to think those responsible for them were actually just let down by what they probably thought was going to be a modern tale of vampirism. There are also internet moans that animals should not be treated cruelly, that’s totally right, but this a film, I repeat “a film” and the dog doesn't really end up in the blender, you don’t see it go in.
Yes I suppose there are a few similarities between this story and a particular classical horror tale, the legend of “Countess De Bathory”, but they are not connected in any way, or that “Daddy’s Girl”, is a retelling.
Daddy's Girl Official UK web site for a gallery of stills and more http://www.daddysgirlthemovie.co.uk/default.asp
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