By DEIRDRE CRIMMINS
Starring Al Warren, Sarah Coffey and Kimball Farley
Written and directed by Mark H. Rapaport
Kinematics
Three years ago, writer/director Mark H. Rapaport brought his feature debut HIPPO to the Fantasia International Film Festival. That stark black-and-white film was saturated in God complexes, strange sibling relationships and major philosophical discussion. Along those same lines, GODHEAD (a world premiere at the current Fantasia) revisits Rapaport’s earlier film, though this one is focused on an entirely different deity.
GODHEAD starts with an infant being dropped on a doorstep in a shopping basket. The man (Al Warren) who finds the baby becomes a father that day for the second time. No, he does not have any other children; rather, he is a priest. We watch him teach this boy (Luke Speakman of WEAPONS) about God’s world and His creation of all it contains. But this is no typical creation myth. In Father’s retelling, it includes an eighth day: “On the eighth day God went away. He left us.”
This struggle with belief and question if there is room for adaptation quickly becomes GODHEAD’s central theme after the arrival of a pair of twins. Sarah Coffey and Kimball Farley play these track-suited sibling oddities. The two arrive unannounced at Father’s modest chapel and ask him for a favor that is anything but conventional. Were their performances anything less than utterly convincing, GODHEAD might have been much less effective, but both are on point and completely captivating.
A lot of things go very right in GODHEAD that could have suffered at the hands of a less assured director. Much of the running time is spent talking, in dogmatic terms no less; the heady, tense dialogue could have tipped into tedious, were it not for the actors and the unconventional framing of each word and line. There is a sense that GODHEAD should not work as well as it does, but the bottom line is, it’s hard to look away.
Given that this review is appearing at RUE MORGUE, rest assured there are certainly fantastical and morbid elements at play throughout the film. There are corporeal threats that motivate all three of the adult characters. However, the greater concern in GODHEAD is the potential to upheave everything about Christianity as we know it. Even if that is a meaningless menace to the audience, the important thing is that all these characters are invested.
Rapaport is starting out his career with some fundamentally strange films. So far, both HIPPO and now GODHEAD are absolutely worthy of your attention.
