Beyond plain old prosaic fear, there’s something else that happens when a film is so palpable that it drags you helplessly with it as it plummets into a pit of human darkness.
It’s a completely physical reaction to the shock (or repulsion) of what you’re witnessing on the screen. It first happened to me watching David Lynch’s now classic trip to suburban hell, Blue Velvet. Forty minutes in and my cheeks were drum-tight and pulsing – like a strange, delirious new drug had been pumped into my face.
Others may have a different bodily feeling when those films (they are few and far between) come along. Demented rats gnawing at the inside of your belly, perhaps. A blowtorch to the heart (or any other organ)?
Anyways, Bring Her Back is a movie so gloriously visceral and convincingly in your consciousness that it might do all those things. It’s not a complete surprise, as Australian twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s debut, Talk to Me, was the best horror of 2023.
Like that film, this is fabulously economical (no spooky frills or shallow silliness). The spectre of 1980s video nasties flickers in the opening credits with grainy VHS footage of an overweight naked man, a young girl on her knees and bodies dangling on ropes in a chalk circle. Whether it’s a torture ritual or something else, the message is clear: brace yourself for what’s coming.
However, then we are in very normal, very workaday Australia with 17-year-old Andy (Hackney boy Billy Barratt) and his much younger stepsister Piper (Sora Wong). Leapfrogging over any spoilers, an incident later and the pair are heading to live with a foster mother.
Suspend your disbelief slightly for Laura, a woman who surely no social services in their right mind would ever send vulnerable children too. And then rub your eyes again to check you’re not seeing things, as Laura is played by lovely Sally Hawkins (yes, the sweet, salt of the earth one from Paddington, Wonka and that nice Mike Leigh film).
Surely in the annals of anyone with a cultish bone in their body, Laura will go down as Hawkins’ most deliciously outrageous turn. Mad, bad and bananas, Hawkins is absolutely superb, like a homely mutant cross between Kathy Bates in Misery and Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag.
Turns out Laura’s dead daughter was blind like Piper (ring the obsession alarm!). Wong, who had zero acting experience, is visually impaired and secured the role when her mum saw a Facebook ad for an open casting. When shown from Piper’s point of view, we also see Laura’s home blurred, and 14-year-old Wong pulls off the trusting innocence of Piper so well you want to reach out and protect her.
There’s one more wheel in what is essentially a domestic four-hander: 10-year-old Olly (Jonah Wren Phillips). Selectively mute, with bloodshot eyes that only Satan could have spawned, Olly is another character for the ages to rival Laura. Besides literally chewing the scenery, Olly will linger in your imagination and your physical body for days after seeing this. You may well have to look away from the screen on at least one occasion.
It would be a crime against an incredible film to give away much of the plot, but suffice to say these kids would have been better off bedding down in a warzone than at Laura’s.
What should be said, however, is how brilliantly the Philippou twins have crafted this tight, taut and (for the most part) realistic chamber piece of terror. Shot in a vividly naturalistic style, when the scares come (and they most certainly do) they deliver more than a mild squirm. If you thought the girl biting off her own thumb in recent shark horror Dangerous Animals was a gut-churner, just you wait…
The obvious horror tropes are also either swerved or subverted into a homespun drama, while the brothers weave in lovely incidental moments of wickedly black humour.
Forget Longlegs and those silly, cliched, overwrought fright fests. These twins are making the most original and convincing films in the genre right now, and with Bring Her Back they have just upped their own game to the next level.
Creepy as an ordinary day hell, this is one of the best movies of the year, horror or otherwise. Prepare your body for one of those thrillingly rare, all too real sensations…
Bring Her Back is previewing in cinemas from July 26
