Daddy's Girl (2018)
Directed by Julian Richards
Written by Timmy Hill
Starring Jemma Dallender, Costas Mandylor, Jesse Moss, Britt McKillip
Release Date September 29th, 2020
Published August 23rd, 2022
Daddy’s Girl opens on an ambiguously ominous sight. A very sad young woman sits at a kitchen table with a gun in front of her. It appears that she is going to kill herself before we cut away and begin the story. The kitchen table scene is in the future, the next act of the movie will be about how we arrive at that kitchen table and what has made this sad young woman so desperate as to be considering ending her life.
The young woman at the kitchen table is Zoe (Jemma Dallender). Zoe’s life is as tragic and horrifying as the opening scene indicates. Zoe lives in a backwoods town with her father, John Stone (Costas Mandylor). John is a serial murderer who uses his daughter as bait to lure in his victims. The two go to bars and seek out young women on their own, preferably drifters who might not be missed all that much.
These young women are seduced by the idea that if this older man has this beautiful younger woman on his arm that he must be harmless. That’s when he slips something into their drink. Zoe becomes part of the seduction and the idea of kinky sex drives these young women to go home with the couple. There is no sex waiting in that backwoods home however. Instead, John takes these women into his dungeon and tortures for having thought they would go home with a man and a woman for sex.
John is not interested in sex with his victims, he only has eyes for his daughter. Yeah, the movie appears to go there. I can’t say for sure that John is actually Zoe’s biological father but she does call him daddy and your skin crawls when she does. Zoe is not fully complicit in John’s crimes. The film indicates strongly that she’s been groomed and abused into this position and that perhaps John had murdered Zoe’s mother in order to frighten her into compliance.
John’s double life as serial killer and loving father/owner of a small town mechanic shop becomes threatened by the arrival of a new young deputy. Deputy Scott Walker has recently returned to his hometown from several tours in Iraq as a military police officer and has been tasked with investigating the disappearance of a local girl. Scott is not the only newcomer in town as he meets a drifter named Jennifer (Britt McKillip) just as she is arriving in town. He warns her about missing girls in town and she indicates that she’s not staying long.
That last part is deliberately vague as Jennifer has a part to play in how Daddy’s Girl plays out. Daddy’s Girl is a nasty little slasher movie that never finds a second gear after general cruelty toward women. It’s not that the movie is nasty and misogynistic enough to be memorably awful. Rather, it’s a more mundane sort of misogyny rather typical to the horror genre and thus nothing special. I can’t bring myself to completely condemn Daddy’s Girl, it’s neither poorly made enough or hateful enough for harsh condemnation.
No, in fact, in the performances of Jemma Dallender and Britt Mckillip we have two charismatic women who give the story more credibility than the movie can bear. Both actresses are quite compelling with Dallender having a lot of trauma to play with and McKillip a mysteriousness that is intriguing. Their coinciding stories are remarkable for how these two actresses play their roles. It's a shame that their performances are undermined by how trashy the movie around them is.
Daddy's Girl wallows in the muck of the genre and it never feels organic or well displayed. Instead, the trashiness takes away from what little good there is about Daddy's Girl.
