By Vincent Whittaker.
Unfortunately there’s no shortage of stories about sexual abuse to children nowadays and the term ‘stranger danger’ is a prominent one. News of these atrocities are usually followed by a detailed debate on what should be done to protect our children from the monsters of the world and what we’d like to do to them if we ever got our hands on the ones responsible. Chris Sun addresses this in his movie ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’.
The movie tells the tale of Derek, a single father trying to get by with a failing business and a strained relationship with his ex-wife. His 6 year old girl, Georgia seems to be the only good thing in his life, when suddenly, everything is turned on it’s head. Georgia is abducted from her mother’s home and brutally murdered, making spiral out of control, lashing out at those around him. After months of searching, he finds evidence in the form of a diary that documents the killing and many others. He takes it upon himself to train in many torture techniques and exact a week long campaign of agonising revenge, or maybe it’s justice.
The cinematography on play here is excellent and the soundtrack sets the mood perfectly. The performances from most of the cast are great and really make you feel for the characters, this as well as the writing seems to combine giving a great sense of emotional impact. I genuinely welled up when Georgia’s body is tragically discovered on the beach. My only wish is that they’d kept that same emotional tone going.
Things do take a turn for the worse halfway through though when we descend into what seems like a straight to DVD horror movie. The plot wears thin and the copious scenes of torture porn have no emotional value and only serve to nauseate the audience. Don’t get me wrong I like my horror and enjoy a good gore-fest, but this is a thriller, or at least it has been up to this point and why change when things were going so well. The scenes are well done though and hard to watch at times, so if you love your Eli Roth movies you’ll enjoy these sections. I however feel that it cheapened the whole experience.
Derek’s only feelings in the second half seem to be glee and ambivalence as he inflicts various acts of violence against the killer. This would all be fine if, and here’s where the spoiler comes in, if only the killer was a stranger and not his own little brother. Derek seems to have no emotional connection with his brother at all in the second half of the movie, not one. This misuse of a plot twist and the quite frankly laughable disregard for the emotional connection built up at the beginning, taints the first half of the movie. It’s a real shame too because the movie has a real point to get across and just a small amount of the tormented feelings inside Derek at having to inflict pain on his brother, in order to avenge his daughter, would have left me fulfilled. Instead I’m left feeling cheated that I put in the effort to emotionally connect at the start.
Overall, this movie could have been great but it just seems that the director wanted to make two movies and couldn’t decide which way to go and the subtleties of the first half are tainted by the heavy handed approach of the second.
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