Will Mercer types to the sound of people praising his writing. For an author struggling to produce a follow-up to a bestseller, this seems a peculiarly efficient form of self-torture. The approval supplies both encouragement and a standard he cannot meet: somewhere on that recording is a man who apparently knew what he was doing. Matt Harlock’s Blockhead catches something unpleasantly precise about creative insecurity here. Will has an audience inside his workplace before he has written anything for them to read.
His friend and mentor Maggie offers a different prescription. She wants him to address the traumatic experience he has spent years avoiding. That advice deserves to be distinguished from the publishing language surrounding him, where “confrontational” and “dangerous” function as sales incentives. Maggie asks for an encounter with something painful; the publicity promises readers an encounter with someone dangerous. Will’s difficulty lies partly in how readily those demands become confused. Honesty can require discomfort. There is considerably less reason to assume that behaving appallingly will improve a manuscript.
Danny Horn plays Will as a man whose first success has become an accusation. His novel A Random Act made his reputation six years earlier; a traumatic event and breakdown followed. Now his agent wants material, another novelist threatens to take an opportunity, and teaching provides little protection from his sense of inadequacy. Maggie’s borrowed apartment offers somewhere to work. It also provides an excellent place to become absorbed in his grievances.
Then Mikey arrives with the apparent advantage of never having questioned himself. Joe Sims gives the painter and decorator an expansive sociability that makes intimidation feel like part of the welcome. Beside him, Horn looks physically diminished, his hesitation acquiring an almost spatial quality: Mikey seems comfortable occupying whatever room contains him.
Their pub encounter, including trouble with antagonistic strangers, establishes the practical attraction. Here is someone prepared to act while Will is still considering how action might look. The chemistry works because confidence has an immediate use. Will can borrow it before he has examined its conditions.
I initially took this relationship as a fairly straightforward puncturing of literary vanity. The educated man needs help from someone whose abilities he has been trained to underestimate. Yet Will’s fascination carries its own condescension. He approaches Mikey as a supply of unfiltered experience, a man apparently unburdened by the reflection that makes his own life intolerable. Practical competence becomes a fantasy of psychological simplicity. Will admires him while reducing him, which makes the friendship an uncomfortable extension of the novelist’s habit of treating other people as material.
Harlock does not entirely escape that reduction. Mikey’s physical bulk, trade, and appetite for confrontation make a familiar package, and the film relies heavily on our recognition of it. Sims helps by keeping the character’s pleasure in company close to his menace. His encouragement feels available and attractive. When he urges Will to stop taking his medication and pursue his resentments, the promise of liberation becomes coercive, but it retains the voice of a helpful friend. Will’s new confidence arrives with instructions attached.
The visual design follows that bargain with considerable clarity. White, grey, and pale blue give Will’s initial surroundings the drained quality of a life held in suspension. Mikey brings stronger color into the film’s vocabulary; sickly greens and yellows then contaminate Will’s world as his condition deteriorates. The progression makes vitality itself suspect. An escape from pallor can lead somewhere nauseating. Harlock gives the apparent recovery an unhealthy complexion before Will is prepared to recognize its cost.
Horn is especially effective in carrying insecurity into aggression without making the earlier vulnerability disappear. The same need for recognition persists as Will becomes frightening. His professional grievances acquire a violent outlet, but their pettiness remains visible beneath the inflated sense of purpose. That continuity gives the performance its bite. We can understand the humiliation without accepting the importance Will assigns to it, and Horn lets sympathy become an increasingly awkward position to occupy.
The fractured chronology extends this problem into the telling. Leaps across time and space make memory, invention, and lived experience difficult to separate. For a film about someone trying to turn experience into prose, that instability has a useful ethical dimension: Will’s account keeps slipping away from verification. His desire to shape the material becomes difficult to distinguish from his desire to control what can be known about him. Questions of appropriation and concealed history make authorship a less innocent activity than the solitary struggle at the laptop first suggests.
Some of the film’s literary credentials work harder than others. The mid-film drug excursion, accompanied by a reference to Coleridge, feels too ready to borrow cultural authority for its altered state. Naming a poet does limited work when the association between intoxication and inspiration is already so familiar. The sequence loosens the film’s concentration on Will’s particular evasions and admits a stock mythology of creative excess. Elsewhere, the professional humiliations are sharper because they are so embarrassingly specific.
Familiarity also limits the psychological construction. The relationship between the inhibited writer and his uninhibited companion invites an early comparison with Fight Club, while the explicit Jekyll and Hyde connection leaves little mystery about the territory.
Harlock’s interest in artistic borrowing gives that familiarity a thematic purpose, though it cannot make every recognizable device fresh. The film holds attention most securely when it stays with what Will uses this arrangement to excuse: resentment of rivals, hostility toward professional gatekeepers, and an appetite for authority that survives his loss of control.
That appetite finds a receptive audience in Josh, the young student drawn to Will’s increasingly unrestrained classroom pronouncements. The teaching scenes shift the consequences beyond a writer’s private collapse. Someone else is watching and learning to associate belligerence with conviction. Josh’s admiration grants Will a renewed authority at precisely the point when his judgment is becoming least trustworthy.
Blockhead embarked on its UK theatrical tour in November 2026 following festival screenings like FrightFest. Directed by Matt Harlock, the psychological thriller follows a struggling novelist whose life plunges into violent chaos when he is inspired by a psychotic decorator who acts as his strange muse.
Full Credits
Title: Blockhead
Distributor: Independent / Blue Finch Films
Release date: November 2026 (UK Cinema Tour)
Rating: 15
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes (90 minutes)
Director: Matt Harlock
Writers: Matt Harlock
Producers and Executive Producers: Matt Harlock, Oliver Kendall, Paul Harry Thomas, Josh Barnes, Mike Chapman
Cast: Danny Horn, Joe Sims, Michele Moran, Jake Mavis, Charlotte Pyke
The Review
Blockhead
Blockhead is sharpest when artistic freedom starts looking like permission to mistreat people. Danny Horn and Joe Sims give that bargain an unsettling attraction, while Harlock’s color shifts make renewed confidence look distinctly unhealthy. The familiar divided-self machinery and a labored drug excursion limit its psychological surprises. Its literary satire has firmer teeth: Will wants to recover his voice, preferably without having to listen to anyone else.
PROS
- Horn preserves Will’s insecurity beneath his aggression.
- Sims makes intimidation disturbingly sociable.
- Color changes give creative deterioration a physical presence.
- Literary satire connects admiration with destructive authority.
CONS
- Familiar psychological devices limit surprise.
- Mikey leans on class stereotypes.
- The Coleridge reference adds little to the drug sequence.
