As in their ferocious Talk to Me, the dead haunt the living in Danny and Michael Philippou’s Bring Her Back.
However, whereas the sibling directors’ debut was concerned with communion, their sophomore effort, in theaters May 30, revolves around resurrection—a feat that requires some serious monstrousness. Once again exhibiting a knack for mournful horror punctuated by sudden, jarring jabs of gruesomeness, the Australian duo’s latest is a nightmare whose accomplished tone, pace, drama, and scares trump any minor narrative hiccups.
With an unhinged Sally Hawkins spearheading its mayhem, this sinister saga firmly establishes the filmmakers’ place near the head of the contemporary horror class.
Bring Her Back parallels its predecessor in a few notable ways, beginning with a focus on characters coping with the recent deaths of parents.
After picking up stepsister Piper (Sora Wong) from the bus stop, where she’s mocked by peers for her visual impairment (which physically manifests itself via misaligned eyes), older Andy (Billy Barratt) comes home to find his dad lifeless on the floor of the shower, the vomit on his chin and chest implying that his demise was less than pleasant.
Andy plans to become Piper’s legal guardian when he turns 18, but since that’s three months away, social worker Wendy (Sally-Anne Upton) assigns Piper to a new foster mom in Laura (Hawkins). Desperate to avoid being separated, Andy convinces everyone to let him join Piper at Laura’s house. There, he grins and bears it as Laura disregards him (she can’t even get his name right) in the same manner that, it’s eventually revealed, his biological parents did before their passing.
Surprisingly, Andy and Piper aren’t the sole kids in the household, as Laura already has a foster son named Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips), who’s been mute since Laura’s blind daughter Cathy (Mischa Heywood) drowned in the backyard pool—which now sits empty. Oliver is a strange kid with a shaved head and a birthmark under his right eye, and since we’ve already seen that blemish on another child’s face in Bring Her Back‘s prologue—which boasted images of an old naked man drawing a white chalk circle on the ground, and profane dungeon rituals involving bodies being hung and corpses being feasted upon—it indicates that all is not right in this remote residence.
Further upping the creepiness quotient, Oliver remains largely locked up in Laura’s room, and when he goes outside, he prefers standing in the pool shirtless, cradling a cat whose howling and scratching don’t seem to faze him.
While Bring Her Back‘s title is, frustratingly, a dead giveaway about its primary secret, the Philippous build suspense with precision, aided by Hawkins in a performance that’s disturbed whether she’s showering her charges with affection or lashing out at them—or, more specifically, Andy—over minor or fabricated infractions.
At their father’s funeral, Andy is too upset to gaze at the body in the casket and lies about it to Piper, and in an early bit of bizarreness, Laura exposes his deception and then forces him to kiss his dad’s corpse because “it’s custom.” Weirdo ceremonies are Laura’s specialty, as she demonstrates by surreptitiously cutting the deceased’s hair so she can later feed it to Olivier. A subsequent night of boozing turns inappropriate when Laura starts pouring Piper shots, and the following morning, Andy awakens, for the second time, to discover that he’s soiled himself in his sleep—or, at least, so he thinks.
The Philippous don’t rush Bring Her Back; rather, they let bizarre elements accumulate until the film is ready to burst, be it glimpses of grainy VHS recordings of unholy rites or Andy spying Laura and Oliver sneaking off to a nearby locked shed in the middle of the night.
A weather app’s forecast for endless downpours proves accurate, and the resultant rain casts an ominous pall over the proceedings. Water and circles are the material’s dominant motifs, suggesting, respectively, birth and eternity. Still, if life is Laura’s chief fixation, her main method of creating and maintaining it is via violence, and her increasingly deranged behavior dovetails with revelations about the abuse Andy suffered as a child and, also, dished out in response to his resentment and fury.
Bring Her Back‘s refusal to indulge in exposition is to its benefit, but it shuffles somewhat predictably toward its bombshells regarding the nature of Laura’s nuttiness. Moreover, in the film’s third act, the directors lean a tad too heavily on obliqueness; by striving to maintain mystery (and not hold their audience’s hand), they keep one key plot point too elusive for its own good.
Even so, Hawkins is a mesmerizing vision of maternal sorrow and devotion, her every action and reaction just this side of insane. Barratt, meanwhile, confidently shoulders his responsibility as the story’s de facto protagonist, evoking Andy’s desire to transcend his failings and unprocessed trauma in order to protect the vulnerable Piper, all as he copes with a surrogate mom who’s determined to manipulate his hang-ups to her strategic advantage.
In its home stretch, Bring Her Back stages one gasp-inducing act of brutality on par with Talk to Me‘s most squirmy moments, and it doesn’t skimp on the eye-popping grisliness, most of which involves chomping mouths disfigured by objects both sharp and dull.
There’s a hunger coursing throughout the film, and that appetite can only be satiated by feasting on the innocent. In its closing stanzas, the Philippous find ways to both turn stomachs and pull at heartstrings, refusing to play things safe or to provide their characters with the comfort they crave. Their film’s worldview is bleak and yet not nihilistic, contending that cruelty is the often-inevitable offspring of grief, pain, and anguish—an evil that seeps out of wounds that, no matter their age, refuse to heal.
With their second feature, the Philippous confirm that they’re genre auteurs capable of balancing morose creeping dread with mad, malevolent nastiness. There are more than a few sights in Bring Her Back that won’t soon be forgotten, although what’s apt to linger longer is the film’s portrait of loss as a voracious beast that consumes everything—love, trust, morality, sanity—in its path.
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