Bring Her Back Is a Daunting Exercise in Unpleasantness

When Talk to Me took social media by storm in 2023, I figured it was probably too good to be true. I’ve been in these mines for far too long: horror hype has a terrible hit-to-miss ratio, and people are easily impressed by catchy gimmicks, cheap gore, and a story that’s “actually about trauma.” Talk to Me—a bona fide A24 hit that made $92 million against a $4.5 million budget, and spurred both an in-development sequel feature and a prequel short—was pretty much exactly that. And to cap it off, the single moment of excessive, shocking violence is the high point of an otherwise rote story about addiction and grief, which then immediately peters off afterward. Following years of uploading comedy shorts to the internet, former YouTube stars Danny and Michael Philippou showed skill in their directorial debut. But Talk to Me was more like a collage of beats and images from successful horror films of yore, rather than a distinct vision from a new filmmaking duo.

Two years later, the Philippou brother have returned with Bring Her Back, a film that can’t help but come across like a direct answer to critics who had an issue with Talk to Me’s sole sequence of squirmy violence. As a result, the Philippous said, “We will make a film that is so viscerally nasty and violent that you will not be able to complain that it isn’t nasty and violent enough—so there.” However, if this is indeed an approximate interpretation of what both twin brothers said in unison (because they’re twins), then this sentiment was not followed through with much of anything else, instead producing a film that is only daunting in its sheer unpleasantness and not nearly insightful enough to warrant it. Perhaps this lack of ingenuity in the story these filmmakers are trying to tell was most handily exemplified in their jovial introduction that played before my screening. The brothers—seemingly off the cuff—revealed the entire plot of their film right before the audience was set to see it. Unfortunately, Bring Her Back is not at all aided by its audience knowing in advance plot details that should naturally unfold throughout the course of the story.

Bring Her Back begins with a death: A freak slip-and-fall in the shower tragically kills the father of stepsiblings Piper (Sora Wong) and Andy (Billy Barrett). With Piper’s mother no longer in the picture either, the two teenagers are placed into the foster system and set to be separated. But Andy is fiercely protective of his younger sister, who is visually impaired—not blind, but unable to discern anything beyond lights and shapes. The same visual impairment affects Wong, the actress who plays Piper, in a stunning performance that belies its status as her feature debut. Andy insists that the two of them remain together if only for a few months, until Andy turns 18 and can apply for sole guardianship of Piper. With a reluctant blessing, they end up in the care of Laura (Sally Hawkins): an eccentric still grieving the accidental drowning of her daughter. Laura plainly does not want Andy in the picture, outwardly suspicious of past physical infractions which had been flagged by the children’s social worker. But the schism between the two is fully realized when Laura noses her way into catching him bad-mouthing Oliver (Jonah Wren Phillips): her extremely creepy, selectively mute nephew, introduced to the film with an attempt at strangling her cat.

From the jump, it is made clear that Laura has an involvement in black magic—though to what end remains vague, at least for a while. She encloses her property in a painted white circle, privately watches VHS tapes of a horrific ritual alongside a blank-faced Oliver (who is under some sort of supernatural influence) and snips hair off the head of Piper and Andy’s dead father during the wake. But it’s the introduction of Laura’s deceased daughter and her maternal attraction towards Piper upon which the sequence of events and meaning of Bring Her Back is brought into sharp, obvious relief. Through Piper, Oliver, and a satanic ritual that was so helpfully recorded on a hand-held camera and then formatted onto physical media at some point, Laura has plans to return her daughter to her; plans which may be compromised only by the watchful eye of Piper’s older brother, who fosters a far deeper distrust of Laura than she does of him. But Laura is a character whose malicious designs are in no way unsympathetic. Hawkins plays her with care: Laura has love to give but that love has become mutated by despair, and Hawkins expertly, compassionately conveys this woman’s descent into madness.