Bring Her Back

Dean

Wasn't expecting such a great horrow show from Australia. It's quite gruesome. Well done.

Decent trauma horror. Chewing scene was great! Go ahead and put this ham on your face as you may need it to cover your eyes in some scenes.

CinemaSerf

When their father is found dead in the shower, seventeen year old “Andy” (Billy Barrett) wants to look after his blind step-sister “Piper” (Sora Wong) but he’s just too young. Rather than split them up, social services offer to send them both into the care of “Laura” (Sally Hawkins) who has recently lost a daughter of her own. She seems to take to the young girl, but is completely indifferent to her big brother and both siblings are perplexed by the presence of the mute “Oliver” (the scene-stealing Jonah Wren Phillips) who seems to inhabit a world all of his own. As the newcomers try to settle in, it becomes apparent that “Laura” has an agenda that might not synch up with either “Piper” or “Andy” and when she clearly starts to sabotage not just their relationship but also any chance he might have for guardianship, an ulterior motive starts to rear it’s brutally ugly head. This is a completely different type of horror movie from most I’ve seen, and that’s largely down to Hawkins. She exudes a potent combination of trustworthiness and coercive intimidation really quite compellingly. Her character got quite successfully under my finger nails as she played her manipulative game and unusually, I found myself caring about these two youngsters. It’s tensely directed, set amidst a remote farmhouse and plays nicely to assumptions that this woman has been endorsed by the authorities, so therefore she must be kosher for these kids still dealing with the grief of finding their dad on the bathroom floor. It also benefits from concluding in a largely unexpected fashion, and it’s safe to say that the underpinning psychology of this story of bereavement and desperation is quite a compelling watch. After about twenty minutes, try watching it with your eyes closed for a short while - it is quite scary.

After the explosive and inventive horror of TALK TO ME, my anticipation for Danny and Michael Philippou's follow-up was immense. I was prepared for intensity, but nothing quite readies you for BRING HER BACK, a film that perfectly defines the term "tough watch." This is a profoundly discomforting and disturbing experience, featuring some of the most visually shocking and traumatic scenes in recent memory. The true standout is the makeup and prosthetics department, whose gruesome work is so visceral it burrows under your skin, no matter how seasoned a horror viewer you might be. The Philippou brothers once again demonstrate their exceptional storytelling craft, employing a stark "show, don't tell" approach that trusts the audience's intelligence to piece together a layered narrative. While the underlying story is more straightforward than their debut, the masterful control of tone and pacing builds an almost unbearable tension, sustained by tremendous performances. Sally Hawkins is predictably brilliant, but it's the young cast — led by Sora Wong and Billy Barratt, and featuring a spectacularly creepy Jonah Wren Phillips — that carries the movie's heavy, dark heart. Where the film elevates itself from mere shock horror to something truly profound is in its brutal thematic exploration. This is a story about how unresolved grief can corrupt and metastasize, twisting a mother's love into a monstrous, obsessive force that perpetuates cycles of abuse. The supernatural elements serve as a dark, powerful allegory for the very real horrors of identity erasure and the vulnerability of foster children, used by adults to fill their own emotional voids. Andy, our voice of reason, anchors the narrative as he fights to protect his blind stepsister, Piper, from the chillingly manipulative Laura, a woman whose unholy grief drives her to commit unspeakable acts. It's a complex, harrowing dynamic that's almost perfectly executed, save for one bold decision regarding a character's fate that feels tacked on for shock value rather than narrative substance. Still, this is a minor issue in an otherwise remarkable work. An unforgettable and essential piece of modern horror, as thematically rich as it is visually terrifying. Rating: A-

"Bring Her Back" has the desperate loneliness and sadness that is inevitable following the death of a cherished loved one as a central theme, but this pivotal subject matter has rarely been explored in such gross and utterly grotesque terms as it is here and quite frankly it is somewhat surprising this film ever got a mainstream release at all. It takes the central character of Laura - the tremendous Sally Hawkins - and through her the film explores and literally redefines how destructively obsessive some people can become provided the stakes are high enough. Laura isn't an evil person, but she has become dangerously twisted and unbeknownst to her the obsession stemming from the grief of her daughter's tragic death has impaired her judgement to an alarming extent and developed to an unhealthy degree and all we the audience can do is watch in mounting horror as the nature of her insane actions unfold in this uncompromisingly gruesome and absolutely gripping film.

FolknHell

## Bring Her Back There are films where the occult machinery is the frightening bit, and then there is *Bring Her Back*, where an elaborate resurrection ritual involving a kidnapped child, a corpse in a freezer and some exceptionally unpleasant eating somehow has competition. Because the really nasty thing here is Laura. Sally Hawkins plays her with a horrible plausibility. Laura is a long-serving grief counsellor, foster carer and apparently trustworthy adult, which means that when Andy realises something is profoundly wrong, she does not need to lock him in a cellar to neutralise him. She simply makes everybody stop believing him. She separates him from Piper, engineers situations that make him appear violent and lets her professional credibility do the rest. Watching him become the unreliable person in his own entirely accurate account of events is more disturbing than a conventional monster would be. And there is plenty of conventional unpleasantness available. Ollie chewing a knife is particularly vicious because the film first encourages us to read the knife as a weapon. Then it discovers something worse for him to do with it. The later bouts of indiscriminate eating push the body horror further still, but without turning the film into a procession of gross-out set pieces. The same restraint matters with Piper. Her blindness unquestionably increases her vulnerability, yet the film avoids the obvious trick of giving us blurred point-of-view shots whenever something dreadful stands nearby. Instead, it works through how she navigates the house, what she can perceive and the gradual accumulation of details that tell her Laura is lying. It makes Piper vulnerable without making her helpless. Even the resurrection ritual is refreshingly untidy. Laura appears to be reconstructing it from a degraded VHS recording, following fragments of some older occult practice without necessarily understanding all its rules herself. That uncertainty is far more interesting than an explanatory handbook arriving in the third act. Does that make *Bring Her Back* folk horror? Perhaps only at the edges. There is inherited ritual, an enclosed environment and an old belief system intruding into contemporary life, but very little sense of the closed community we would normally expect. The label matters less than what the film does with belief: grief turns Laura into exactly the sort of person prepared to believe an appalling old ritual because ordinary reality has become unacceptable. It is brutal, deeply tense and occasionally revolting. More importantly, it understands that the most frightening person in the room is often the one everybody else thinks they can trust. --- Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Bring Her Back: folknhell com/bring-her-back-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.