The Sci-Fi Fatherhood Dramedy of Daddy Proves Confoundingly Vague

It’s fitting, in its way, for a film with such vague aspirations as Daddy to bear a title with this much open-ended ability to interpret, and this little ability to easily look up via a search engine. Attempt to find evidence of directors Neal Kelley and Jono Sherman’s indie sci-fi feature dramedy online, and you’ll run into a plethora of random films named some variation upon “Daddy,” which could easily leave the curious viewer uncertain of how to progress. That’s also likely how the viewer may feel after finishing the movie, which is held aloft by solid comedic performances but undermined by a reticence to take a stand on most of its messaging, or commit to its narrative and sci-fi premise. That the filmmakers would choose a title so generic and easily confused for countless others as Daddy almost seems to suggest a certain level of anxious self-sabotage at work, but nevertheless, after initially premiering at festivals in 2023 the film will finally find its way to a wider audience as it hits VOD this week.

What Daddy immediately has going for it is a classic sci-fi hook that could easily be adapted with no changes as a Black Mirror episode or Yorgos Lanthimos feature. In the near future, human reproduction in the U.S.A. has become a carefully regulated dystopian nightmare. Both aspiring fathers and would-be mothers must go through rigorous aptitude and personality testing administered by the government to determine who will be allowed to procreate, with applicants judged through an opaque and mysterious system with unclear criteria. We join four men–Jeremy (Jono Sherman), Sebastian (Yuriy Sardarov), Andrew (Neal Kelley), and Mo (Pomme Koch)–who are shuttled to a remote retreat in the mountains for a “fatherhood seminar,” which is seemingly the final phase in the selection process. The winner will be allowed to have children. The not-so-lucky other applicants will receive mandatory vasectomies. It’s hard to not feel the clear relevance of the central theme, at a time when federal and state governments in the U.S. are implementing more and more draconian measures to control the reproductive rights of Americans. It’s an interesting choice, to frame this kind of story around men rather than women–perhaps an invitation for male viewers to consider how our current government could one day affect them for once.

Implied messaging and broad strokes, though, are about as far as Daddy is willing to go in pursuing its thesis. When the four men show up at the retreat location–which is styled somewhere between southwestern hacienda and Nordic lodge–they’re expecting to find a “monitor” waiting for them, and be put through various tests and exercises. Instead, they find nothing: A fully stocked house, but no instructions of any kind, nor any way to contact the outside world. Immediately, they fall into arguing about the correct course of action. Have they been abandoned? Are they meant to wait here and be patient? Is the monitor observing all their actions via hidden cameras? Do they invent this fatherhood course for themselves? What of the baby doll they find on a mantle: Is this chunk of plastic now their proxy child, like a junior high student assigned to carefully watch over an egg or a sack of flour? Daddy offers no confirmations, but merely hammers at its central theme of governmental and societal neglect–the men share stories of others they know who have gone through the fatherhood or motherhood program, and even those chosen never know why they were chosen or rejected. The system is as cold, remote and impersonal as it can possibly be, something clear to the audience from the opening moments, when one of the men is interviewed by a white, Alexa-like device that identifies itself as the “Fatherhood Resource Aptitude Neural Network.” Apparently in this world, your word association choice when presented with the word “butter” is an important fatherhood criteria to be assessed.

This is a strong, classical premise for sci-fi comedy or dramedy, the tone largely determined by how the men react to their circumstances, but it quickly becomes clear that Daddy is mostly just using its setup as a means to an end, an excuse to keep our quartet of performers in the VRBO or Airbnb rental in which the film was presumably shot over the course of a couple of weeks. They don their color-coded sweatsuits–helpful in aiding the audience in assigning archetypes to each–and just allow their personalities to bounce off each other in haltingly comedic fashion. Andrew is a serious-minded, seemingly moral and reasonable man of faith. Jeremy is an earnest would-be father, but is anxious and not very bright. Mo is a guitarist who seems to have some anger issues, and a questionable commitment to fatherhood. And Sebastian, the most interesting of the four, dons his red sweatsuit and immediately begins imposing manosphere-style alpha male psychology on the others, individually attempting to forge alliances with each and inflame petty grievances between the four. He seems to believe he’s on some sort of reality show, and behaves accordingly: You keep waiting for him to hit you with a chestnut like “I’m not here to make friends!”