If your debut film – in this case 2023’s Talk To Me – ends up as one of the year’s scariest and most well-regarded horrors, where do you go next from there? Well, for a second, it looked like Danny and Michael Philippou were about to cash in their hard-earned indie chips for a gig directing the Street Fighter reboot. Thankfully, though, they’ve chosen a more honourable route, as fun and lucrative as doing a Street Fighter might be, sticking to their horror guns with the truly horrifying Bring Her Back. Not quite as scary as its predecessor, it makes up for that with raw emotional intensity, some of the most upsettingly violent scenes you’ll see anywhere this year, and a madly good performance from Sally Hawkins.
Hawkins plays Laura, a grieving Australian mum who could not be further from Hawkins’s usual archetype of funny and cuddly; Laura is, in fact, one of the most well-drawn-yet-hateful villains from any horror of recent years. With her blind daughter Cathy having died before the film starts, she takes in two foster kids – visually impaired 14-year-old Piper (Sora Wong) and her protective big brother Andy (Billy Barratt) – with a cult-inspired long-term plan to have Cathy’s spirit possess Piper through some dark ritual involving Laura’s ‘nephew’ Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips).
The full scope of this plan is revealed gradually but even before anything truly ‘off’ starts, it’s clear as day that Laura should be nowhere near the foster system. She’s still mad with grief and brittle with anger, ignores boundaries and gaslights constantly, and no one benefits from sharing a house with the terrifying Oliver, least of all Oliver himself. In fact, this is so obvious that it ends up as part of Bring Her Back’s main weakness – a plot that, even in a world where you accept horribly visceral resurrection ceremonies, spends a lot of time stretching your suspension of disbelief.
Luckily, you’re barely given the time to think about story holes once things really start to unravel. Hawkins escalates her mania and cruelty at a perfect pace and pitch and, while not ‘scary’ in the way Talk To Me was, Bring Her Back is in a constant fever of anxiety and stress that starts immediately with Laura’s overfamiliar greeting to the grieving siblings and pushes to some truly sickening places. It takes a *lot* to earn an 18 rating in a film without any sexual content and really not even all that much swearing, but the Philippous earn every bit of that.
The violence here is personal and nasty and specific in a way that made my skin crawl – the amount of detailed, systematic trauma committed by and against mouths in particular will have you hiding your teeth behind your hands just as much as your eyes. It’s in these scenes of blood and madness that Oliver really comes to the fore (his least distressing moment in the whole film still has him grab a kitchen knife by the blade), and it’s a remarkable performance from young Wren Phillips as a child made demonic by a deranged caregiver.
Bring Her Back is less formally flashy than Talk To Me was, but it’s a restraint that feels fully correct for this milieu, which is mostly much more grounded, and actually manages to make the injuries feel that much more upsetting. If it’s pure tension-release jumpscare terror you’re looking for, Bring Her Back might leave a little something to be desired, but for a horror film to commit this hard to horrifying you, and to do it without crossing the line into cheap B-movie sleaze, is something very valuable indeed.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 