Review: Baghead

Baghead is a prankish comedy-thriller overtly about desperation and insecurity.

Baghead
Photo: Sony Pictures Classics

A prankish comedy-thriller overtly about desperation and insecurity, Jay and Mark Duplass’s Baghead begins with a dead-on Q&A at an L.A. indie film festival, where an underground auteur (Jett Garner) condescendingly responds on matters of budget and improvisation. The corker? “Do you plan every word you’re going to say every day?”

A quartet of unemployed actors, after being ejected from the festival’s afterparty, ruminate about their careers and decide to hole up in a house in the sticks to write a screenplay for their own calling-card vehicle. This second feature by the Duplass brothers soon becomes a kind of mumblecorish spin on The Blair Witch Project (or, at least, a riff on that film’s founding marketing myth that it was authentic found footage). But the crux of the suspense is where the joking will stop, both among the deceptive and game-playing characters and by the filmmakers. As a hybrid, Baghead is destined to disappoint horror fiends who take its predator-in-the-woods moves at face value, but it delivers on its premise that the shameless scheming of a friend can be a scarier phenomenon than a boogeyman with a knife.

The rural retreat is fraught with emotional evasions and sexual peril. Would-be leader Matt (Ross Partridge) and soft-shelled beauty Catherine (Elise Muller) have been on-and-off “soulmates” for 11 years, and Catherine harbors thirtysomething worries about maintaining a screen-friendly ass while noting Matt’s flirtation with the younger, pixieish Michelle (Greta Gerwig). Elsewhere, Matt’s self-loathing friend, the pudgy Chad (Steve Zissis), is smitten with Michelle, who at one point ducks her head away from his attempted kiss while stingingly reassuring him that he’s her best friend and like family. But before things can devolve into full-blown sex farce, Michelle has a dream (or does she?) of a menacing figure with a bag over his head lurking outside the cabin, and Matt seizes on it as a perfect concept for their script. Then a bedroom-invading baghead materializes, and there are a couple of disappearances; is it the work of a psycho or just, as the press notes jokily call it, “a Scooby-Doo narrative”?

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For all the use of first takes and jerky camera moves, the John Cassavetes invoked by Baghead is =n’t the indie pioneer saint but his Faustian thespian-husband character in Rosemary’s Baby. Isolated cabin setting notwithstanding, the principals aren’t horny teens but neurotics who are just old enough to be panicking at their lack of prospects. Among the nice Friday the 13th-variety in-jokes, though, is an unpleasant shock that comes to Matt mid-masturbation.

All four of the ensemble members impress as recognizable, self-designated losers who are alternately buoyed and annoyed by the others’ attentions and demands. “I am cute, I am funny,” Matt makes Chad repeat to deflect the focus from their tiff over Michelle, but also trying to be his friend’s Broadway Danny Rose in a strangely supportive way, with stranger yet to come. If the film’s “reveal” can’t help coming off as anticlimactic, the novelty of its creators’ juxtapositions and energy of its cast make it a funny and disquieting stumble through sleepaway-camp territory, and a caution not to mix unrequited love with screenwriting.

Score: 
 Cast: Ross Partridge, Steve Zissis, Greta Gerwig, Elise Muller, Jett Garner  Director: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass  Screenwriter: Jay Duplass, Mark Duplass  Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics  Running Time: 84 min  Rating: R  Year: 2008  Buy: Video

Bill Weber

Bill Weber worked as a proofreader, copy editor, and production editor in the advertising and medical communications fields for over 30 years. His writing also appeared in Stylus Magazine.

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