Bring Her Back is just as catchy and exclamatory a title as Danny and Michael Philippou’s 2022 horror hit Talk to Me. So, you might be here expecting something with a similarly bold, crowd-baiting sense of glee. But where their debut – A24’s highest-grossing horror – was all squelchy, Evil Dead-esque gore with a few ideas about grief and trauma sprinkled in for the sake of respectability, their follow-up is a self-described sister film that feels almost its tonal opposite.
It’d be wrong to say that Bring Her Back is necessarily more mature, since somebody does something with a kitchen knife that’s so diabolical you can practically hear the YouTubers-turned-directors cackling somewhere behind the camera. And it’s just as sticky and visceral as Talk to Me. But while their first film was mean-spirited like a hell-born prank, this feels mean-spirited like a ruthless therapist tearing your psyche out chunk by chunk.
It’s a horror film that’s about grief (as always), but also about the more uncomfortable realities of the cycle of abuse, the sort of stuff that lives and breeds unspoken in dark corners. And it’s all screaming out from inside the big, desperate pools that are Sally Hawkins’s eyes. She’s weaponised her public image – all the timorous grace and kindness of Paddington’s adoptive mum, The Shape of Water’s fish-man bride, and Mike Leigh’s Ms Happy-Go-Lucky – to create something truly nefarious: an antagonist who we see in all shades, whose distinct humanity is as frightening as it is tragic to witness.
No one believes recently orphaned teen Andy (Billy Barratt) when he claims that his new foster carer, Hawkins’s Laura, is up to something awful. He has his own bad history, after all, and look at her – she’s a former counsellor in knitted cardigans who snorts when she laughs, and who’s welcomed in Andy and his visually impaired stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) with open arms. She lost her own daughter, who was blind, too, not that long ago.
To Andy, and more importantly to audiences, there’s not much guesswork involved in the question of what she’s really up to. The film, after all, is called Bring Her Back. We’re quickly introduced to a saucer-eyed kid called Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), whose selective mutism prevents Andy from finding out much about who he is and why Laura treats him more like a pest than a child. She spends her nights watching VHS footage of strange rituals (murder, howling, vomiting blood etc etc).
But the Philippous are smart enough to recognise that these kinds of necromantic shenanigans are fairly worn-out territory. There’s so much more dread to be teased out by the subtler, more uncanny details: the lingering effects caused by the death of Andy and Piper’s father and Laura’s erratic, manipulative behaviour, which moves from shaking leaf to free spirit to monster with the same slipperiness of the thick, Australian monsoon-season mud.
The terror here is distinct. We’re tightly bound to Andy’s viewpoint, as a kid torn up by a very complex form of grief, finding those wounds prodded at again and again by a woman whose own very complex form of grief has turned her into a living boogeyman. Talk to Me and Bring Her Back speak in the same language of loss and give it immediate, bodily form. But the latter also shows us a new, more mournful side to a pair of filmmakers who’ve proven they’ve a great future in the genre.
Dir: Danny Philippou, Michael Philippou. Starring: Billy Barratt, Sora Wong, Jonah Wren Phillips, Sally-Anne Upton, Stephen Phillips, Mischa Heywood, Sally Hawkins. 18, 104 minutes.
‘Bring Her Back’ is in cinemas from 25 July
