And it has Sally Hawkins. I suppose after seeing unimpeachable talents like Hugh Grant, Toni Collette, and Florence Pugh topline horror movies, it should come as no surprise that Hawkins has done the same. But still there’s something novel here: reimagining the brightly beaming star of the Paddington movies as a suburban psychopath is a world-class act of counterintuitive casting. Hawkins’s Laura is a diminutive, hippy-dippy monster who takes the two siblings, Piper and Andy, in and promptly starts fucking with them. The younger sibling, Piper, who is mostly blind (she’s played by the vision-impaired actress Sora Wong) and stridently independent (she refuses to use her mobility stick), is seduced by Laura’s ministrations. Her brother, Andy (Billy Barratt, who is a tousle-haired revelation), is a different story. He’s suspicious from the start, but also vulnerable and traumatized and not able to do more than keep a wary eye on Laura, a watchfulness that amplifies the movie’s unease. There’s also another boy in the house: Laura’s young son, Ollie (Jonah Wren Phillips), who says not a word and stalks around, mostly shirtless, like an adolescent zombie.
What is going on in Bring Her Back? I personally loved how coy and restrained the Philippous can be in their storytelling—mood is more important than careful explanations to these writer-directors—but the leaps in logic may annoy some people. Nevertheless, you viscerally understand that the occult rituals Laura furtively watches on hoarded videotapes are a prelude to something awful she herself is planning. And you figure out early that Ollie isn’t actually Laura’s son, or entirely human. His eyes aren’t right, his belly is distending grotesquely, and he eats anything in sight, including, in one indelible scene, the blade of a kitchen knife.
