Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Come to Daddy’ on Amazon Prime, a Totally Crackers Thriller in Which Elijah Wood Tackles Terrifying Father Issues

Now free for Amazon Prime members, Come to Daddy rummages through the drawers of uncategorizable midnight movies, and turns up some nifty filmmaking and storytelling curios. It stars Elijah Wood as a flimsy-millennial type who sees his hardcase father for the first time in decades, and then it makes a hard left. And here, we’ll determine if that turn puts the whole endeavor on the right path or directly into the drink. 

COME TO DADDY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Norval (Elijah Wood) gets off a bus in the middle of a gorgeous nowhere. He wears expensive boots, a hipster mustache and a fascie-bowl haircut that’s so severe you just want to slap it off his head. He uses a hand-scrawled map to trek through a pine forest and along a rocky coastline, arriving at a severely isolated home that looks like Troy McClure’s space-age house if it was built by beavers.

He will soon describe it as being “like a UFO from the 1960s” to its owner, his father (Stephen McHattie), the man he’s been estranged from for 30 years. When Norval was five, Dad up and left him and his mom, but the old man wrote him a letter out of the blue, but for what reason, Norval doesn’t know. Pops greets him with a hug, but his demeanor isn’t particularly warm. They take a selfie on the deck overlooking the sea, and the old man accidentally drops Norval’s phone — all gold, designed by Lorde herself, one of only 20 in existence — on the rocks and into the ocean. “Accidentally.” Dad’s air is one of opaque menace. He carries himself as if he knows what it’s like to kill a man or vote Republican.

And yet, Norval isn’t afraid to open up a little; maybe the guy will respond in kind. At dinner, when Dad offers him wine, Norval reveals he’s an alcoholic who once attempted suicide. Dad responds by making a show of pouring himself a big glass and voraciously gulping it down. That night, Norval hears him arguing passionately with… who? Himself? Nobody? The next day, they go for a swim, and when Norval dives underwater, a large rock hurtles through the air and misses him by inches. Why, exactly, did his dad want him to visit? Just to kill him? Well, Dad won’t answer the question. And here, near the conclusion of the first act, is where I put a sock in it, lest I be tarred and feathered by the spoiler mob.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Come to Daddy has a way-off-kilter, unpredictable Mandyesque vibe, if the Nicolas Cage headtripper was stripped of its (highly enjoyable) excesses and blended with a couple tablespoons of Green Room-style suspense. And does it even exist without Peter Jackson’s early low-budget crazyflicks as inspiration? Probably not.

Performance Worth Watching: Madeleine Sami shows up in the second act to play a coroner who provides the film with a necessary earnest dramatic peg. Did I just reveal that there’s a coroner in the movie? What, did you think the ice cream man was gonna show up eventually to pass out rocket pops and fun kones?

Memorable Dialogue: Dad tries to impress his boy, I think: “I once accidentally kicked a guy’s ear off. I didn’t mean to, but the f—er flew off. I could see right into his skull.”

Sex and Skin: Some yucky-funny male frontal exposure; female toplessness.

Our Take: Come to Daddy is a slippery eel of a movie, wriggling from the grasp of easy categorization. At first, anyway. You really don’t know where it’s going, although you can kind of sense that it’s dark, and to say anymore would likely nuke the entertaining experience of seeing it for the first time. If you just hop on and grip the handlebars tight until one wheel falls off and the other wheel falls off and soon it’s just a pair of plastic grips with ragged streamers flapping in a hot breeze and a banana seat sparking along the pavement on its post, your feet in the air with one shoe on and the other long gone and your face mussed and smudged with dirt and your ribs bruised and possibly cracked, the reward is somewhat substantial.

I will say that Wood is excellent as the dramatic anchor, a man who doesn’t quite understand the depths of his capabilities when faced with extreme circumstances. He has some darkness and weirdness behind his wide, kind Frodo eyes, and Wood plays his hand close to the vest so the character can be a blank slate and a complicated mystery at the same time (why the heck is he reading The Celestine Prophecy?). Norval is privileged and arrogant but also a weak, weak man (please note, I’m not referring to his addiction or depression), and there’s no doubt a lot of his psychological junk is obliterated and replaced with some good old-fashioned brutal trauma. Some bits of the plot don’t work because they either stretch too far or try too hard, but the movie is functional thanks to Wood and his commitment to director Ant Timpson’s eccentric vision.

Be warned, however, that some of the movie’s content is hysterically funny, possibly only because you’re laughing to crack the tension, and maybe stave off the horror with a big stick, if even for just a moment. It’s the kind of movie featuring a scene in which a character with one hand in a shackle resorts to deeply disturbing means to free themself from it and it doesn’t work, and it’s a scene of extraordinary comedy. My point: maybe the movie is sick, but maybe so are you, too, for laughing at it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Come to Daddy is wild and wily genre work that slow-builds to a frenzy of violence and weirdness, and denouements with a smidgen of surprising emotional release. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll probably hold in a little bit of puke.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Come to Daddy on Amazon Prime