Available in theaters, on Digital, and On Demand starting February 10, Daughter is a new micro-budget thriller from Darkstar Pictures. When a young woman finds herself held hostage by a family of three, she has no choice but to play the role of "Sister." While obeying Father and entertaining Brother is the key to survival, Sister is determined to push Father's boundaries and win back her freedom. However, the longer Sister remains trapped, the clearer it becomes that not everything in the house is as it seems.

In addition to directing, Corey Deshon also serves as the film's writer and producer. Previously, Deshon directed the shorts Voice and To Police, and has additional writing credits on projects such as A Million Little Things and Trespassers. Vivien Ngô plays the starring role of sister, with Casper Van Dien, Elyse Dinh, and Ian Alexander completing the ensemble cast.

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Director Corey Deshon chats with Screen Rant about giving the villain of Daughter an understandable perspective and discusses the sad truth behind the story.

Corey Deshon Talks Daughter

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Screen Rant: Where did the idea of a girl being kidnapped and inducted into this family originate?

Corey Deshon: It's interesting. It originated by the practical concerns of making a micro-budget film. When you can't afford a lot of locations, and you can't afford to go a lot of places, you've got to find an interesting excuse to keep everybody in one location creatively. And that became the basis of it.

Even before I knew, creatively, what I wanted to do with the story, I knew I wanted to make something with this group of people that we could just sort of produce for ourselves and get out into the world as a first feature. And so it came out of the necessity of that and then trying to find an interesting spin on that, that hadn't been done necessarily before. Because there are a lot of micro-budget, one room, or one location kind of films, so we're just looking for a unique way into something like that.

The beginning of the film says the story is based more on fact than fiction. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Corey Deshon: Some of the more, I guess, horrific elements or implications of the things that happened in the film—the kidnapping, chaining up of a family and things like that—I didn't have to make any of that stuff up. You see these news articles of people doing that to their families. It's shocking how little that element of it had to be fictionalized for the film. It was really just where we would go from there that became the inventive story, but everything else is based on things that we've seen happen in the world to other people.

A lot of scenes had to be perfected in one take. Was filming in that style an added challenge?

Corey Deshon: I wouldn't say an added challenge, so much as it was the challenge that we decided to take on, in this case. This was originally intended to be a twelve-day shoot, and it ended up being something like eleven and a half. We knew, because of how much dialogue we had to shoot, we needed to move pretty quickly. So no matter what style we were going to film in, that meant not a lot of takes. We couldn't shoot everything with traditional cameras. There wouldn't have been enough time in the day.

I appreciate different creative approaches, anyway, and trying to capture something in a frame a little bit differently. The idea that we would shoot a lot of things in masters and try to use ensembles staging and move the camera very subtly to keep multiple actors in frame, rather than having to do a new setup, move lights, move the camera, things like that, was both practical and creative. I guess I would say it's trying to make the limitations of the time and budget become the creative aesthetic of the film. It's just those two things feeding into each other.

Was all the blocking established beforehand? Or was any of that improv?

Corey Deshon: A little bit of improv, but not too much. The house is a lot smaller than it looks in the film. Because we shot everything so wide, it looks really big, but we were in pretty confined spaces. Even the limits of movement were just there for us. We couldn't move a certain way, so everything had to be contained into a certain space. But within that, I'd give the actors an idea of, "Here's where the frame borders are, this is what you can do within this space, and this space is yours, but just know we're only doing shooting it this way. So if you turn around that way, we're not going to get that coverage." And they would just take it from there.

Did you have a specific backstory in mind for Sister? Because we don't know anything about her other than what happens in the house.

Corey Deshon: There was originally an introductory sequence written for the film that explained a little bit more about how she got there, or at least how she was taken by Father, that we weren't able to complete for practical production reasons. Because it doesn't actually exist in the film, and it's something that nobody will ever see, I've decided not to explain what it is and not to really give any additional context. Kind of in the way that I have to be forced to accept the fact that it's not there in the film, I put the audience in that position too.

We don't know exactly where she came from. She doesn't know why she's there. She has to live with the tension that that creates within her in the way that the audience does now too—not having the answer to that.

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On one hand, Sister is trying to be strategic, but on the other hand, she keeps making these remarks that get her into trouble. Was that rebellious impulse a way to give insight into the character?

Corey Deshon: Absolutely. You're spot on. It is in her character and in her nature to push those boundaries and see what the boundary is. I think, for her, once she understood the system of how the house worked, she wanted to see what its limits were. She wanted to see where she could poke and prod and get away and buy herself little bits of freedom here and there, and, in a way, almost call Father's bluff. Because again, she doesn't necessarily know what's happened in his house prior to her arrival, either. Anything that she's learned about she's been told directly, and she doesn't necessarily trust Father's word. So she wants to see for herself, is there possibly a way that I can get out of this?

What was most important for you to establish when creating a character like Father?

Corey Deshon: I think at first, even though he was going to be the clear villain of the film, giving him a perspective that was understandable. You can relate to the idea of this father who wants to keep his family together. What he defines as his family is a little questionable, but ultimately he's just a dad that wants his family safe.

The way he goes about it is questionable and what he does to other people and things like that, but I wanted even from his perspective, to have this truth to what he was doing. Like, "I am doing this because I want to protect this person, I want to protect my family, I want to create a safe environment for them. And as long as everybody plays by my rules, everybody will be safe." And that is a genuine thought of his. He genuinely wants everybody in the house to be safe and to be happy. He just has his own twisted way of enforcing that.

Could you dive a little bit into the performance Sister and Brother put on and Father's reaction to it? I'm sure there's more than one interpretation.

Corey Deshon: There's one that is the version of what happened in the kids' minds—what it looked like for them—and Father reacting to what he saw. The other version is that's what Father saw, regardless of what it is the kids actually did that caused that response in him. It was really just the idea of introducing what was the final unacceptable element to the house. With Daughter continuing to push and try to find those limits and what the boundaries were...that ultimately became the line. That sort of creative expression that was not acceptable within these confines would push Father over the edge.

What are you hoping the ultimate takeaway is from Daughter?

Corey Deshon: Well, that's another thing. Everything has multiple answers. What was fun about first sending the script out to the cast—this was a little bit, by intention, of how each character was written—there are different interpretations you can take away based on whose perspective you're looking at it through. So it was fun when everybody got the script for the first time, they were each trying to guess what the meaning of the film was and come up with very different conclusions just based on who they were reading for.

I hope a similar thing exists for the audience when they see it. That, based on what character they might relate to more or what their own personal interest might be, or where they are in their life, they might take away a slightly different meaning of it. I would say that I have a meaning that is personal to me that I expressed within the film, but I don't necessarily need my meaning to be someone else's. I'm always curious to hear what other people think the film means, or what the significance of certain elements of it were.

About Daughter

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A young woman is kidnapped and inducted into a bizarre family as their new surrogate daughter. As she navigates through this twisted dynamic, awful secrets about the past are revealed, leading to even darker implications about the future.

Check out our other interviews with the cast of Daughter:

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Daughter is available in theaters, on Digital, and On Demand starting February 10.