Unsettling, spooky, nasty, demonic and icky, Bring Her Back is a modern horror classic demonstrating brothers Danny and Michael Philippou’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the genre, spun their own way. Their feature debut, 2022’s Talk to Me, was no flash in the pan.
It takes a while to work out what’s going on but the brothers give us domestic jeopardy to chew on until all can be revealed. After their father dies unexpectedly in the shower, sibling teenagers – he older than her – are farmed out to a foster carer. Andy (Billy Barratt) is nearly 18 and in three months intends to become his almost blind stepsister’s legal guardian. All he has to do is hang on.
Until then loving Andy and Piper (Sora Wong) are to be billeted with a carer, Laura (Sally Hawkins), who has recently lost a daughter of her own, also blind. Laura is now left with only her son, Oliver. A selectively mute shaven-headed “weirdo” (as Andy is soon describing him), Oliver is glimpsed in an early scene hugging a cat. Or is he trying to strangle it?
Back to Laura, a cheery, over-sharing, unctuously chummy, nosy sort straight out of the horror book of classic wrong’uns, Hawkins playing her with all the red flags flying. Laura clearly only wanted to take Piper into her home and is soon lavishing motherly attention on her – too much really. Andy meanwhile is initially treated as the plus one until eventually Laura launches a subliminal campaign to get rid of him.
Like a character from a hybrid Grimms’ fairy tale, Andy is the Cinderella of this story, with Hawkins as the wicked stepmother. Other imperilled fairytale waifs – The Babes in the Wood, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood – also make background appearances, the Philippous fancying all this up with references to J-Horror, The Omen, The Innocents, Saw and other horror classics.
So they have mis-spent youths, but the Philippous also have a knack for original nastiness. As in Talk to Me, there is visual unpleasantness. The make-up and prosthetics are really special – Rebecca Buratto, Paul Katte and Nick Nicolaou deserve all the plaudits that have been heaped on them. The scene in the kitchen where Oliver picks up the sharp chef’s knife and starts chewing on it… yeh.
Hawkins is spectacularly good. She’s always been reliable as dementedly cheerful – see Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky. Here she is a version of that character. Laura is fun when it suits her, getting drunk with Andy and Piper when she shouldn’t, but there is something seriously wrong with her, as the demonic gleam in the eye is telling us if the regular glimpses into her TV viewing – snuff movies? – haven’t already.
What’s going on? Clue’s in the title is all I’ll say. I watched this at home and had to pause it several times and walk around the room. It gave me the willies. Hawkins, I’ll say it again, is brilliant as the unhinged Laura. But Jonah Wren Phillips, as feral child Oliver, is also remarkable. Fabulously dead eyed. A spooky horror kid for the “best of” lists. Against these two the excellent Billy Barratt and Sora Wong would not be able to compete if this were a competition, which it isn’t.
This has a sustained mood of dread, plus jolts, it has clear influences but it’s not derivative, and there is an unnerving aspect that’s all its own, plus that something that Aussie horror more generally often has – the mundane riding roughly against familiar horror tropes.
And under it all, surprisingly and highly effectively, a quiet little essay on grief and the extremes it drives people to, which allows Bring Her Back, after much blood-letting, screaming and gruesome unpleasantness, to end on a poignant note that’s almost comical. Much as I loved Talk to Me, I cannot imagine the Philippous topping this.
Bring Her Back – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
