Samantha Morton

(In French, On Cable TV, April 2022) If you’ve seen any of the countless evil-kid horror movies out there, then you’ve already seen most of what The Daisy Chain has to offer. Part of being a film reviewer is answering a simple question: does this film justify its existence? Does it offer novelty, entertainment, reflection, or emotion? The answer here is troubling, because The Daisy Chain is strikingly unoriginal, dull, superficial and empty. The dreariness sets in early as a young mourning couple moves to a godforsaken Irish village to escape their problems: For one thing, I really don’t want to be stuck in an Irish village; for another, anyone with a milligram of genre savviness knows that this attempted kind of escape always ends up creating new and worse problems for the couple. So when an autistic girl coming from nowhere (warm up those violins, because it’s going to get worse) is gradually adopted by the family, it’s a foregone conclusion that none of this will result in sunshine, rainbows or unicorns. The female lead character (played by a really pregnant Samantha Morton) is pregnant? Oh dear. The male lead doesn’t want to take in the young girl? I’ve got baaad news for him. The rest of the film’s 89 minutes feels more like three hours, as the film boldly goes through the expected plot points and ends on the just-as-predictable bloodbath. Some viewers will enjoy the dour execution, but if you have even the slightest distaste for evil-kid horror films, then The Daisy Chain is just the same, except not fun at all.