Baghead review – ancient face-covered demon emerges from creepy pub’s basement

Photograph: Reiner Bajo

The extravagant absurdity of this chiller from screenwriter Lorcan Reilly and director Alberto Corredor might conceivably get it an audience. There are some interesting touches, but horror fans might well feel that it’s just too similar to the recent and frankly superior Australian film Talk to Me – though it must be said that Talk to Me was made well after Reilly and Corredor’s original 2017 short, with the same high concept, on which this is based.

Iris (Freya Allen) is a young woman, bitterly estranged from her widower father (Peter Mullan) and she is astonished to learn after his death that she has inherited from him a creepy old pub. And this pub has a 400-year-old she-devil locked up in the basement, her face concealed by an old sack, nicknamed “Baghead”. On request, and for two minutes only, she can summon up any dead person you want to talk to – but keep talking for more than two minutes, and the spirit of the dead is irreversibly loosed into the world of the living. An angry, intense young man, Neil (Jeremy Irvine) shows up at the pub, offering Iris fistfuls of cash, desperate for the chance to speak just one last time to his dead wife. But things go terribly wrong.

Neil’s first encounter with Baghead contains an amusing and insightful twist on the subject of his fear of women, but otherwise this film is a lumbering mess of cliched jump scares, and people’s eyes going demonically black and speaking with Daleky voices at scary moments. The original setting has been uncomfortably and bafflingly transplanted to Berlin – presumably because of the European co-production funding – without ever really explaining why and how a Scottish bloke (Mullan) came to own this “pub” in Berlin with its English name, The Queen’s Head. This creates a layer of clunky inauthenticity which scuppers it almost entirely.

• Baghead is released on 26 January in UK and Irish cinemas.