Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou solidified A24’s signature horror reign with 2022’s twisted and evil-spirits-summoning “Talk to Me,” about a party game gone horrifyingly awry for a group of teen friends. They’ve upped the stakes with a more gruesomely disturbing but seriously, conceptually half-baked new thriller, “Bring Her Back,” in which Sally Hawkins is psychotically good and in an unhinged, manically grieving form we’ve never seen her in.
The British “Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Shape of Water” actress ever brings a touch of whimsy or furtive sadness to her roles, often as a woman with a secret. In “Bring Her Back,” her secrets are overwhelming every cell in her being as a foster mom, Laura, who is seriously unwell and taking desperate measures to resurrect the spirit of her own biological dead daughter — and in the flesh of one of the two foster children she’s inherited. Despite Hawkins’ commitment to the bit, however, Laura is a cartoonish villain that makes identifying with or even understanding her grievous plight — there is no word in the English language for a person who’s lost a child, after all — a steep challenge.
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In that sense, call A24’s latest scary offering another entry in the genre of grief-house horror, movies that use genre tropes into a quote-unquote deeper exploration of trauma and pain. But that in itself is becoming a tired trope, one that the Philippou brothers, despite considerable skill behind the camera and especially in directing young children, mined already with “Talk to Me.”
Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barratt) are a codependent sister and brother — she’s also blind and mocked for her amblyopia by classmates, and in need of his constant physical and emotional support. They’ve just lost their father, who drops dead in the shower for reasons that may or may not eventually have to do with both the kids’ no-longer-with-us mother and the burdens that come with raising them. “Bring Her Back,” with some memorably harrowing images courtesy of cinematographer Aaron McLisky, reminds a shadow or so of another A24 horror movie, Ari Aster’s “Midsommar,” in its chilling sequences of familial bodily maiming that become a motif that terrorizes the protagonists in the present.
They’re shoved into the foster care system, and into the woods-ensconced home of care worker Laura, who already lives with a seriously disturbed child in the form of Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), a mute with the vacant cough-drop-eye stare of someone who’s seen something very awful but has been deprived of the words or ability to speak of it.
‘Bring Her Back’Courtesy Everett Collection
Things get seriously creepy when Laura is dressed, uh, very casually (and honestly rather chicly in oversized sunglasses) at Piper and Andy’s father’s funeral and she forces Andy to kiss the corpse. “It’s a tradition,” but it’s also obviously the start of a witchy spell that is also somehow related to the snuff movies lying around Laura’s house on VHS in which an obese or pregnant naked man is seen encircling a naked young woman who is terrified out of her mind. As if the taxidermized pet dog weren’t weird enough, or the fact that Laura gets absolutely shitfaced with the kids to pry more secrets out of them to harness her power, or something.
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The mythology of “Bring Her Back” is dizzyingly unclear and patched-together from what feel like studio notes commissioning both over-explication and also less of it, as if ambiguity alone can pass for scares. But the emotions and the performances in the present day are there, especially from Barratt, who thinks he’s experiencing his own sort of post-grief psychosis when he wakes up in bed every morning covered in his own piss.
What starts to come into view is that Laura had a daughter who looks suspiciously like Piper, and that perhaps Laura has tried this trick before on Oliver, who can’t leave the premises without having a grand mal seizure. It has something to do with the chalk outline surrounding the house, the familiar iconography of the occult even though the movie begins literally with the words “this is not a cult.”
Eventually, Billy tries to warn the foster care headquarters, managed by a kindly woman named Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton), that Laura is trying to sabotage Billy. There’s a grimly hilarious moment when Wendy shows up for a wellness check and Laura claims that Piper didn’t want to change a thing about her dead daughter’s original bedroom decorations.
“You’re lucky the child is blind,” Wendy says, which in a sense also applies to the filmmakers, who’ve contrived Piper’s blindness merely as a device to advance certain set pieces at the film’s end. That’s no knock against the turn from Wong, who eventually gets the best audience-cheer-eliciting moment in a film that otherwise induces eyerolls with regards to how Laura keeps getting away with her cartoon-villain behavior.
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You want to throttle this woman, which is the point, but it makes “Bring Her Back” into a taxing experience. Except not taxing emotionally, where it should count, as despite the Philippous’ flair for craft, they here don’t quite connect the dots from horror movie that features grief to a horror movie that’s truly about grief. And grief is becoming as shopworn an old horror yarn as trauma once was; I think we finally put that one to rest.
Grade: C+
“Bring Her Back” opens in theaters from A24 on Friday, May 30.
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