It’s an ordinary day for Andy (Billy Barratt), and his younger step-sister, Piper (Sora Wong). Piper, who was born visually impaired, approaches a group of girls at their school bus stop and, when the girls snicker at her disability behind her back, Andy lies to her: they liked her, he says with a grim smile that Piper can’t see. Piper, for whom Andy is her whole world, believes him, and they head home. But what they find at home turns their entire world upside down: Andy and Piper’s dad lying face-down in the shower, deceased.
A still-shocked Andy and Piper are quickly taken in by social services and prepared for a new foster home, one that had oddly only requested Piper and not Andy. When Andy insists on staying with his sister, the social worker takes them to their new home, where the charmingly frazzled Laura (Sally Hawkins) welcomes Piper with a warm embrace. Hawkins, the star of such indie comforts as Happy-Go-Lucky and genre films like Paddington and The Shape of Water immediately sets us — and Piper and Andy — at ease. She’s just a little scatter-brained, eccentric, or even whimsical, just like the many characters she’s played before. It’s probably nothing that she’s a little cool towards Andy. It’s probably nothing that her other foster child, Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), acts a little bizarre and has a strange tendency for gripping the cat too tightly. Except for the brief touches of blood and viscera in the opening scene where Andy and Piper discovered their father, Bring Her Back might have been just a typical kitchen-sink indie drama in which a group of troubled people find some kind of solace in each other. But, coming from rising horror directors Danny and Michael Philippou, whose 2022 debut film Talk to Me became a sleeper hit, Bring Her Back clearly takes a very different direction.
That direction, however, takes its time. The Phillippous, who came up through their DIY YouTube channel RackaRacka, showed a talent for efficient, propulsively paced horror with Talk to Me, a horror film that had as much wild energy and fun as it did horrifying twists. Bring Her Back is decidedly less fun, a somber and bleak supernatural horror that flirts with the psychological family thriller that Ari Aster perfected with Hereditary. It might be an attempt by the Phillippous to cement their status as horror’s new buzzy directors by taking on this more “elevated” horror story, but it ultimately feels devoid of the energy that made their debut feature a hit.
That’s not to say Bring Her Back isn’t without its virtues. One of them is Sally Hawkins, who weaponizes her specific brand of whimsy to upend our expectations of her sinister foster mother. Hawkins plays Laura with a brilliant mixture of disarming warmth and … something slightly off. She’s got a strange affinity for taxidermied pets, and the way she treats Oliver is strangest of all — she seems simultaneously reverential of him and scared of him. They’re all things that could be written off as eccentricities, but they’re slowly revealed to be signs of something much more malicious, even demonic. Laura’s true intentions start to reveal themselves when she begins to frame Andy for troubling behavior, and manipulate Piper into siding with her. It’s all behavior typical of the villain of a horror movie like this, but Hawkins’ slightly kooky, deeply sad performance is so interesting that it powers Bring Her Back through its pacing slumps. It’s a genuinely interesting performance that feels slightly out-of-step with the rest of the film, which plods along, so heavily mired in dread and grief that it makes one wonder whether the Phillippous lost their knack for brisk, efficient pacing.
Hawkins delivers a fierce, unsettling performance that elevates Bring Her Back.
A24
However, the Phillippous haven’t lost their knack for brutal, disturbing horror. Bring Her Back engages in bodily trauma, including one deeply upsetting, squirm-inducing scene involving a chef’s knife and Oliver’s mouth — so gruesome that it veers into body horror. The makeup and prosthetics, courtesy of the Sydney-based Make-up Effects Group (M.E.G.) and Larry Van Duynhoven’s Melbourne-based Scarecrew Studios, is beautifully unsettling, transforming Jonah Wren Phillips’ Oliver into a beastly, lurching thing. Coupled with the brief flashes of horrifying satanic rituals glimpsed in a fuzzy video tape, Bring Her Back finally begins to tap into the stomach-churning dread it had been chasing.
While Bring Her Back gets caught up in body horror and Sally Hawkins engaging in child endangerment, Andy and Piper end up suffering for it. Though Barratt and Wong are ostensibly the main characters of the film, they end up mostly being bystanders in a story happening around them. Even the grief that they’re experiencing feels muted, because Hawkins’ grief is so strong and overpowering. It’s a shame that their characters feel mostly stiff and one-note, after the Phillippous did so well in making each teenage character of Talk to Me feel so real and rich. But you can’t really blame the Phillippous for pivoting so hard to Hawkins, who is so magnetic and terrifying that she demands your attention.
Ultimately, that’s the thing about Bring Her Back: its beats might feel overly familiar, and its pacing particularly sluggish, but when it finally does unleash all its horrors — personal and demonic alike — you can’t look away, even if you want to.
