The Daemon

Losing a parent doesn’t affect everybody in the same way. Not everyone has a close relationship with their blood relatives, and in cases where there has been abuse, such a death can even bring relief. Even in situations like that, however, it can be a disorientating experience. Kathy (Sara Fletcher) knows that people can behave oddly in this situation, so she tries to give her husband Tom (Tyler Q Rosen) some space in the aftermath of his father’s suicide. It’s one thing for him go up to his father’s lake house for a break however; it’s another for him not to call for days.

Worried, Kathy calls on her house-flipping brother Mark (Oscar Wilson) and his troubled psychiatrist partner Jess (Adriana Isabel) for help, and they decide to drive out to the lake house themselves. What they fail to anticipate is Tom’s reason for trying to deal with this alone – a reason that goes far beyond reckoning with emotional difficulties. Ever since he was a child, helping to look after his disabled and curiously troubled mother, something about the lake has haunted him. Returning, he might have thought that he could clear up what he thought of as his father’s mess, but he soon comes to suspect that he is in way over his head – and now the people he cares about most are in peril too.

The Daemon has been billed as Lovecraftian Horror. This turns out to be less in the existentially sublime way than in the slime coming out of people’s faces way. Fans of gore and body horror will be pleased, and from that perspective it wasn’t a bad pick for Frightfest 2024. It may disappoint those of a more literary inclination, but it does have its moments. A favourite phrase of Lovecraft’s, ‘the crawling chaos’, is deployed to good effect, and writers/directors Matt Devino and David Michael Yohe accordingly explore an aspect of the mythos hitherto neglected by cinema, such that one can almost forgive the self-indulgence of the film’s twee final shot - which, to be fair, some viewers will cheer, but which will make absolutely no sense to you at all if you are not already familiar with this subject matter.

It’s harder to forgive the soap opera quality of the interpersonal drama here, which relies a lot on shouting to signify big emotion, rather than delivering any more nuanced depiction of what those emotions are. Some effort has been made to fill in background details about the characters so that we know what they are, but we never get much sense of who they are. Naturally, this makes it harder to care about their fate.

The lake house location has a lot of potential, with shadowy interiors, surrounding woodland, an uneven sandy beach and, of course, the water itself, but rather flat lighting undermines the effect of this and the film never succeeds in building up the deeper sense of creepiness that it needs. If we fear what’s out there at all, it’s because it looks ugly and does nasty things, rather than because it taps in to a deeper sense of dread. Aspects of the story that rely on us buying into characters’ psychological collapse are under-supported. In the end, this comes across as just another effort to imitate the greats, rather than a film with real ideas and direction of its own.