Come to Daddy

Norval Greenwood, a privileged and awkward thirty-something musician living with his mother in Beverly Hills, receives a handwritten letter from the father who abandoned him at age five, asking him to visit a remote coastal cabin in Oregon. Desperate for connection, he goes. The man who greets him — grizzled, contemptuous, drunk — mocks Norval's clothes, dismisses his career, and turns openly hostile when Norval reveals he once attempted suicide. During a drunken argument involving a meat cleaver, the man suffers a sudden heart attack and dies. The local coroner, lacking morgue space, returns the embalmed body to the cabin, leaving Norval alone with the coffin.

Strange thuds begin echoing through the cabin at night. While searching the house, Norval finds photographs suggesting the dead man was not his father. He locates a hidden hatch, descends, and finds a man chained in an underground cell — beaten, bloodied, and very much alive. This man insists he is David, Norval's real father.

David explains: years ago, after leaving Norval's family, he went to Bangkok and fell in with a group of criminals — Gordon, Jethro, and Dandy — who kidnapped the daughter of a Thai billionaire and collected a large ransom. David then double-crossed them, stole all their shares, and used the money to fund the comfortable life Norval grew up in from a safe distance. His former partners eventually found him. Gordon posed as his father in the letter as a trap to lure Norval there as leverage.

Jethro arrives at the cabin to continue torturing David. Norval attempts an ambush, fails, and a scuffle erupts — Jethro escapes, promising to return. Norval, using a method that requires dislocating his own fingers, frees David from his chains. They have their first real conversation. Then Dandy arrives. The ensuing fight ends with Norval stabbing Dandy's genitals repeatedly with a barbecue fork before suffocating him with plastic wrap.

Norval and David flee, but Jethro is still hunting them. Norval hides in Jethro's car trunk planning an ambush — only to be driven to a nearby motel, where Jethro has arranged to meet a sex worker. The ambush collapses. The sex worker restrains Norval; Jethro stabs him multiple times and fires a crossbow at his face. Norval survives and escapes. He had previously flattened Jethro's tires, and Jethro's flight ends when he crashes into a road sign, partially shearing off the top of his skull. Sitting in the road with his brain exposed, Jethro taunts Norval — claiming his mother was someone both he and David had slept with — before uttering a single unexplained word: "Arthur." Norval stabs him through the exposed brain.