Made In Britain: Daddy’s Girl (2006)

There’s no moral justification for Daddy’s Girl to exist, and there’s also no reason at all for it to have widespread availability other than for the presence of Jamie Winstone. Furthermore, this was a strange take on modern vampire tales, but in this case it reduces vampirism to a psychological disorder; an all-consuming craving for haemoglobin. This is not a supernatural vampire film, the bloodsucker in question can’t turn into a bat, doesn’t have a garlic allergy and isn’t flambéd in daylight. What it is, is an attempt to draw one of the archetype supernatural monsters into the mundane world of 21st Century London. It’s also a drab and viscerally unpleasant story, a strange sub-horror hybrid that I’m not sure really works. 

Stephen (Richard Harrington) is a psychiatrist with serious problems. His wife (probably to get away from him) has offed herself, and his mother is dying of an unnamed terminal illness. In the meantime, he’s been assigned to care for Nina (Jamie Winstone) a deeply disturbed teenager with a penchant for self harm. In a purely disastrous career move, he starts porking her mother (Louise Delamare) and becomes obsessed with his patient. To be fair, she’s already obsessed with drinking blood, and has him marked as her next long-term victim. Events spiral completely out of control and he starts taking advice from a psychic plumber (really) before the film ends very badly for him in a thoroughly idiotic and grotesquely unpleasant twist ending that simply doesn’t work because it relies on him being a complete cretin.

She'd read the script and decided this was the only way out.

There isn’t an icon of horror that’s been as badly abused as the Vampire. They’re meant to be terrifying blood consuming monsters that are borderline all-powerful, but nowadays they’re just as likely to be dodgy kiddy molesters that sparkle in the sun. Here, in another attempt to deliberately demystify the monster, they’re actually human but in the grip of a frightening mental illness. Nina is essentially an EMO chick with a horrific attitude and serious mummy issues, who delights in nothing more than cutting herself.

The acting here is very patchy. Harrington has serious problems in his performance, but that’s because the character is such a fucking imbecile. Winstone is much better, but she’s at least got a consistent part, and isn’t, I believe, Lolita-ish enough for the role. This, actually, is a serious handicap to the role, as there has to be some kind of draw to the character, as the lengths he goes to are far beyond the call of duty and there’s no real reason that he’d put himself so far in harms way for her. Nevertheless, she’s good in the role and you can see potential in her chav type turn here. The rest of the support isn’t really worth bothering with, but are all basically OK.

"Seeing as you like cutting things, come round my place and do my fucking lawn on the weekend"

I’m going to stick the knife into this film now, although I do appreciate in a way what it’s trying to attempt. The first thing to consider is that the script and direction is ridiculously unfocused. The pudding is supremely overegged on more than one occasion. His wife’s suicide matters because it makes him vulnerable to Nina, but the angst is supplied in more than enough by that. However, the film doesn’t stop there, and the sequences with his mother are gratuitous and not really needed. Furthermore, there’s bizarre and inexplicable comic relief provided by his estate agent (culminates in the oh-so-funny scene of murder) that is ill-fitting to the storyline. This is badly written stuff.

On this front, I want someone to explain to me precisely what the purpose of psychic plumber is? Is he comic relief, because he isn’t funny? Does he move the narrative forward? Not especially, in fact on more than one occasion it feels as if he exists as nothing more than an exposition factory. He churns out explanations that we can easily grasp otherwise, although to be fair to him, the supernatural shenanigans in the apartment with the water pipes are wholly out of place in this film. Daddy’s Girl is a movie that goes to great lengths to reduce the fantastical to the mundane, so why are we being plagued by a haunting sub-plot? Writer/ Director D.J. Evans has to answer for this, as it’s obviously his fault.

"My father's the fucking daddy you know"

As he also has to answer to the other two major flaws of the film. The first is that the narrative only functions if Stephen is an utter idiot. Case in point: for the finale to work, he has to allow his deeply fucked up patient in to his flat late at night and then allow her to drug his drink without noticing. By this stage of the film, though, he shouldn’t be allowing her anywhere near him (and I mean within 10 miles) simply because of the frankly repulsive things he already knows she’s done.

Which brings me on to the next flaw. This is a fucking nasty movie, and I’m not understating that. It isn’t torture porn (thank the lord), but I swear to god I never, ever want to see another movie where a teenage self-harm fetishist stuffs a small dog in a blender and then drinks the results. Just read that again: she stuffs a small dog in the blender and then drinks the results. It’s fucking horrible on almost every conceivable level, and in such poor taste that I struggle to believe that anyone thought it was a good idea. Furthermore, this could quite easily have been implied, so I’d like to know what the idea of showing her stuffing the fucker in the Magimix and the look on her face while Fido gets turned into a smoothy and blood fountains everywhere. Blech.

It's a real slush puppy

Overall, this isn’t a good film. I can see flashes of what they were going for underneath, but the script is at least 2 drafts away from being workable. There are just too many bad ideas, too many implausible leaps of faith and there are too many bad and unworkable ideas here. Were the film less seriously unpleasant then I’d be tempted to recommend it, because in a lot of ways it does earn respect for being well made and acted, but at the end of the day I don’t feel an overwhelming need to put myself through this again. Not recommended.

I’m not sure what I’m going to go for next in this series, as there are quite a lot of films on Lovefilm that I haven’t seen or reviewed yet, but I’m going to certainly pick more carefully next time.

Until then,

Jarv.