It may not always seem obvious, but I am always rooting for a film to do well. Always. There may be someone I really dislike starring in it, there may be a budget that could barely cover one day of catering on the last Christopher Nolan movie, and it may be about a subject I have no interest in (or even, very occasionally, find distasteful or repugnant). I'll still root for the film to do well though. It takes a lot of people to get a film made, and those people are often battling against overwhelming odds.
I decided to watch Daughter because it had Casper Van Dien in a starring role. That made it easier to root for. I have been a fan of Casper Van Dien for some time. He has never been one of the best actors in the world, but he has been putting the work in for a good few decades now. Writer-director Corey Deshon, on the other hand, is quite new to feature films. And it shows.
What you get here is the story of Father (Van Dien) and Mother (Elyse Dinh) kidnapping a young woman (Daughter, played by Vivien Ngô) to be a worthwhile sibling for their beloved Son (Ian Alexander). That's it. Daughter doesn't want to be stuck in this new family, however, and needs to figure out ways to create some division that may afford her an opportunity to escape.
Deshon does well to keep things simple here, focusing on the one claustrophobic location, the mind games being played between the characters, and a selection of relatively still and lengthy takes. If he did better with the writing then this could have been a winner, but there's a disappointing lack of quality here, both in the dialogue and in what is unsaid. There's nothing that actually holds your interest, making the 95-minute runtime feel like quite a slog.
Van Dien tries his best in the pivotal role (the film could have arguably been called Father with one or two extra tweaks made to put him at the centre of a few more scenes), but he is unable to spin gold from the thin straw that he's given. The same can be said for Dinh, Ngô, and Alexander, although the two women have some moments that allow them to remain more intriguing and watchable than either of their male counterparts.
I want to say that I can at least praise Deshon for trying to give us something a bit more original, but even that isn't true. Yes, this is different from many other thriller or horror movies in the past couple of years, but there are many other movies that cover similar ground (whether it's the disturbing Bad Boy Bubby, The Bunker, or even, to some degree, The Baby, to name just a few that came to mind as I considered better options while this played out). You should check those out ahead of this, and then feel free to ask me for some more recommendations along the same lines.
3/10
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