We Chat to Corey Deshon, Director of Mysterious Thriller 'Daughter'

Gratuitous violence is ingrained into thriller films, particularly ones focused on female kidnapping, but Daughter avoids depictions of any violence throughout. Was this a conscious choice? 
Yes, definitely. Violence in films is very saturated these days, we are used to seeing it so graphically, it feels like that lessens its impact. So, instead, I wanted there to be the constant threat of violence without ever directly acting on it. I wanted to avoid the cliche deceptions of violence. 

Religious anxiety is definitely having a resurgence in contemporary culture and Daughter establishes the corruption of the soul very early on. What was your goal with using religion as a facet of fear?
I wanted to play around with the idea that any religion could become a tool of oppression. I wrote the script for this film as almost a reaction to Trump’s America and how extremist viewpoints everywhere were tightening their grip on the population. I think religious scripture can be manipulated to prey on people's fears and desires, and that's what the character of ‘Father’ represented - he carefully changed the meaning of the Bible to suit his own philosophy. Working out how to creatively express the anxieties of contemporary issues was very important to this project. 

What was your inspiration in depicting the horror of this family unit?
I had a lot of creative curiosity surrounding the extent to which Father would go to perfect his idea of the ideal, nuclear family, but most of the construction of the family members themselves came from Simone De Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. I really wanted their personalities to be based on different outlooks in an oppressive system. In any given scene, each character is at least somewhat roughly based on the ideas of Beauvoir’s book. Father is based on the Serious Man, Mother on the Subman, and exploring how Daughter acts as a catalyst for Brother to essentially recognise his humanity - it was all part of the process. 

You can almost interpret the whole film as each character living within the extremes of their own subjective reality, where each family member acts as an object in one another’s subjective reality. So when Daughter introduces ethics into this family system, that's when we can play with the collapse of the nuclear family.

Daughter takes place over the scope of essentially two rooms. Was this a deliberate aesthetic choice? 
From the beginning we were aware that, because of our budget, everything had to be pretty contained, and from this came the visual language of minimalism. Hana Kitasei, our cinematographer, and I prepped extensively before shooting and minimalism was always the vision, but as we began to film we noticed other limitations. For example, we couldn't afford the proper lighting fixtures we originally wanted, so we were like, ‘Okay let's lean into this, let's let the shadows just go black.’ Throughout, we were just trying to find a synthesis, how could we let the limitations become the creative, visual language, because a lot of the time that language had to change a lot on the day based on these restrictions. 

Daughter is available to own or rent via AppleTV, Amazon, Sky Store, Virgin Media and Google Play