Starring Freya Allan, Peter Mullan, Jeremy Irvine

Directed by Alberto Corredor

StudioCanal, in cinemas

A young woman inherits a run-down pub and discovers a dark secret within its basement.

On paper, there’s not a lot wrong with the building blocks of Alberto Corredor’s feature debut. Before he meets his gory end, Owen (a growling, sweaty and unshaven Peter Mullan) leaves a warning for the next owner of his pub about the entity in the cellar. Inheriting the establishment, his estranged daughter, Iris (Freya Allan) finds herself to be the guardian of a creature with an unreliable ability to contact the dead. There are some neat twists and turns in the plotting of Christina Pamies and Bryce McGuire’s script. Cale Finot’s cinematography is mostly elegant and convincingly lit.

The problem is the eponymous ‘bag’ which spends much of the film upon the eponymous ‘head’. The bag is a hessian sack with holes in, and on its first appearance it is laugh-out-loud funny, which undermines any chance of thrills in the rest of the movie. I remember being scared witless by a similar bag on the head of a child in J. A. Bayona’s brilliant 2007 horror The Orphanage, so the problem ought not to have been insurmountable. Stifling my giggles, I managed to go with the film for another half an hour until it collapsed under the weight of a few wince-inducingly mismanaged set pieces and its clunky, melodramatic dialogue, against which, efforts of the plucky cast are in vain.

Verdict: There’s a decent story lurking in the bricked-up shadows of Baghead, but sadly the end result is a laughable mess. 3/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com